Issue Overview: Vaccines

Transcription

1 Issue Overview: Vaccines By ProCon.org on Word Count 1,428 Level MAX A young boy receives an immunization shot at a health center in Glasgow, Scotland, September 3, Photo by: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommends getting 29 doses of 9 vaccines for kids aged 0 to six. No U.S. federal laws mandate vaccination, but all 50 states require certain vaccinations for children entering public schools. Most states offer medical and religious exemptions; and some states allow philosophical exemptions. Proponents say that vaccination is safe and one of the greatest health developments of the 20th century. They point out that illnesses, including rubella, diphtheria, smallpox, polio, and whooping cough, are now prevented by vaccination and millions of children s lives are saved. They contend adverse reactions to vaccines are extremely rare. Opponents say that children s immune systems can deal with most infections naturally, and that injecting questionable vaccine ingredients into a child may cause side effects, including seizures, paralysis, and death. They contend that numerous studies prove that vaccines may trigger problems like autism, ADHD, and diabetes. This article is available at 5 reading levels at 1

2 Early History Of Vaccines The first instance of vaccine promotion in the United States was in Cotton Mather, a Puritan minister, encouraged smallpox vaccination in response to an outbreak. Vaccination as practiced today came into being when Edward Jenner, English physician and scientist, created the first smallpox vaccine using cowpox in Jenner s innovation was used for 200 years, with updates, and eradicated smallpox. In 1801, Benjamin Waterhouse, a physician, began using the "Cowpox Vaccine," leading to Massachusetts becoming the first U.S. state to promote the use of vaccination. In 1813, President James Madison signed into law An Act to Encourage Vaccination, which created the National Vaccine Agency. In 1855, Massachusetts passed the first U.S. state law mandating vaccinations for school children. By 1970, 29 states would require immunization to attend public schools. The Anti-Vaccination Society of America was founded in 1879 in response to the states enacting vaccination mandates and with the belief that it "is undignified" to mandate vaccinations and that the "efficacy of vaccination as a disease preventative is a matter of individual opinion." With their influence, the anti-vaccination groups began getting vaccine mandates repealed. In 1885, French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur created the rabies vaccine. The 1930s saw vaccines developed for typhoid, cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and tetanus, among others. Vaccines for polio, measles, mumps, and rubella followed in the mid-twentieth century. In 1902, Congress passed the Biologics Control Act, the first legislation to control the quality of drugs, specifically the quality of vaccines. In 1905, mandatory vaccination was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachusetts. In the aftermath of the ruling more states across the country began to implement mandatory child vaccination as a condition of public school attendance. In 1922, the constitutionality of mandatory vaccination of school children was once again challenged and upheld. The U.S. Supreme Court stated that it was "within the police power of a state to provide for compulsory vaccination." In 1951, Dr. Jonas Salk and his team developed a method to cultivate the poliovirus in monkey kidney tissue in order to be able to produce large amounts of the vaccine. In 1955, the results of the Salk vaccine trials showed the vaccine was 80-90% effective and the U.S. government This article is available at 5 reading levels at 2

3 licensed the IPV polio vaccine. The use of the Salk vaccine reduced the number of paralytic polio cases from 28,985 in 1955 to 72 in Polio was declared eliminated in the Western Hemisphere in 1994 by the Pan American Health Organization. National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act In 1986 the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act was passed in response to a large number of lawsuits filed claiming vaccines were causing adverse reactions including brain damage and death. The Act shielded medical professionals and vaccine manufacturers from liability if an individual suffered injury from receiving vaccines. In 1988, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) was created under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. The VICP was "established to ensure an adequate supply of vaccines, stabilize vaccine costs, and establish and maintain an accessible and efficient forum for individuals found to be injured by certain vaccines." Subsequently, in 1990 the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) was created. VAERS collects information about adverse events via reports filed by anyone, including medical professionals and family members. VAERS receives about 30,000 reports each year. U.S. Congress passed the Comprehensive Childhood Immunization Act of 1993 that created the Vaccines for Children program to provide vaccinations free of charge to children in need in order to increase the number of vaccinated children. Andrew Wakefield And The Autism Controversy In February 1998, Lancet published an article by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. The article claimed "Rubella virus is associated with autism and the combined measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine has also been implicated." Anti-vaccination groups and parents began using Wakefield s article as rationale to opt-out of vaccinating their children. Brian Deer, an investigative reporter, examined the story and published 36 articles which accused Wakefield of "falsifying medical histories of children and essentially concocting a picture, which was the picture he was contracted to find by lawyers hoping to sue vaccine manufacturers and to create a vaccine scare." Lancet retracted Wakefield s article on February 2, In 2011, the British Journal of Medicine published an article stating that Wakefield received over $674,000 from lawyers and that, of 12 children examined, five had developmental problems before being vaccinated and three never had autism. Britain stripped Wakefield of his medical license in Thimerosal And Autism On July 9, 1999, in response to growing concern over a link between vaccination and autism, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the U.S. Public Health Service recommended that thimerosal be removed from vaccines. This article is available at 5 reading levels at 3

4 In 2005, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote an article co-published by Salon.com and Rolling Stone titled "Deadly Immunity," arguing that the 2000 Simpsonwood CDC Conference was spent "discussing how to cover up the damaging data" that there were a "staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity, and autism." The article was corrected multiple times within days of publication, and was retracted and deleted by Salon.com and Rolling Stone. The controversy resulted in an 18-month investigation by the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions which concluded that Kennedy's allegation was unsubstantiated and "thimerosal was (being) voluntarily removed from childhood vaccines distributed in the United States as a precaution," prompted by a joint request by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the U.S. Public Health Service. By 2009, the mercury-based preservative thimerosal had been phased out of all vaccines in the U.S. with the exception of certain vaccines. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that there is no link between vaccination and autism in a 2010 case. The decision upheld two earlier rulings. In August 2011, the Institute of Medicine issued a report. The report brief stated that "evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship" between the Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. However, it also found "evidence convincingly supports a causal relationship" between the chickenpox vaccine and chickenpox infection with subsequent pneumonia, meningitis, and hepatitis in individuals with demonstrated immune deficiencies. The Cochrane Collaboration, in a 2012 independent investigation concluded they could not find a significant association between MMR immunization and a number of conditions including autism. Potential Consequences For Unvaccinated Children State laws in North Carolina, Ohio, and New York allow the public school system to suspend children who are not vaccinated. Approximately 2,000 seventh- to twelfth-grade children not vaccinated against whooping cough were barred from attending classes in San Francisco in On June 22, 2014, a federal judge upheld New York state law barring unvaccinated children from public school when other children have the chickenpox. Many pediatricians will not treat children who have not been vaccinated. Some legal experts believe that parents who do not vaccinate their children should be subject to criminal prosecution if their unvaccinated children infect and harm other children who are too young or immunocompromised to receive vaccines. Elimination means that the disease is not present in a region, while eradication means that the disease does not exist anywhere globally. Smallpox was declared globally eradicated in 1980, the first disease to be eradicated. Polio was declared eliminated in the United States in 1979 and in the Western Hemisphere in Rubella was declared eliminated in the Americas in 2015, and measles in The World Health Organization states that eradication and This article is available at 5 reading levels at 4

5 elimination is the product of vaccination programs that promote high rates of inoculation, while those opposed to vaccination state that better sanitation and clean water led to the elimination of the diseases. Source: vaccines.procon.org This article is available at 5 reading levels at 5