Simple fact: Vaccines save lives
Recently, a group of Kansas parents lobbied state legislators to opt out of the required vaccinations for their children. Parenting is sometimes finding a balance between parental instincts and advice from other sources.
Parents who avoid vaccinations are turning upside down their instincts to protect their children. Can you imagine if every family decided to opt out? Ask around and you will hear stories of fear and uncertainty from the 1950s when our community was battling polio.
This is not the time to expand existing public health guidelines that are protecting you, your family, our bistate community and our country from outbreaks of serious diseases. Vaccinations are an integral part of a healthy childhood in this region and across the country.
Getting our children vaccinated is neither an onerous burden nor an assault on our parental freedoms. The reason our community isn’t under constant threat of outbreaks of serious diseases is that immunization programs are working. Immunization guidelines were developed to prevent children and adults from diseases that infect individuals, threaten entire communities, overwhelm our health care resources and can result in fatalities.
This is not the time to be misled by parents waving banners and frontier slogans hinting at a threat to parental rights. Using buzzwords like “conscientious parenting” in the chatter surrounding this issue suggests a meticulous, scrupulous review of the situation.
In fact, objections to vaccines for personal or philosophical reasons are ignoring the cumulation of medical and scientific research developed over several hundred years. For most children and adults, vaccines prevent diseases and save lives.
Vaccines protect us in so many ways. They protect our neighbor going through cancer treatments.
They protect those with a compromised immune system and/or chronic health issue. They protect babies who are building up a resistance to disease as they grow into young adulthood.
They protect the elderly and other adults who are remiss in obtaining their own booster shots. They protect the few persons for whom vaccinations may not have been fully effective.
Public health officials fear that anti-vaccine movements are on the rise across the country. And it’s not a recent phenomenon.
We can go back more than 100 years to a 1905 Supreme Court ruling that weighed in on the balance between individual rights and the larger arena of community health. At that time, raging smallpox epidemics caused the city of Cambridge, Mass., to mandate that all city residents be vaccinated against the disease.
It’s worth noting that small pox was eradicated in this country and around the globe because vaccinating every at-risk individual worked to the benefit of the larger good and the greater community. This court decision, still referenced today, has allowed communities ever since to benefit from practices meant to preserve our health and well-being.
When we as parents are asked to immunize our children, we aren’t being asked to join a government philosophy of blind faith, eyes and ears covered herd mentality. We are being asked to listen to logic and research, not celebrity anecdotes or debunked and refuted studies, and to respect our community as it seeks to protect its weakest members.
Reasonable, conscientious parenting means consulting with your pediatrician for vaccination guidelines. It does not mean making our children or another child the weakest member of the herd.
Sarah Henshaw Baum, of Mission Hills, worked in finance after studying business, international relations and political science. For the last few years she has been a community volunteer and the family’s manager. Reach her by email at oped@kcstar.com or write to Midwest Voices, c/o Editorial Page, The Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, MO 64108.
Google+
Share
Tweet
Kay Fox
Kansas City
3 months, 1 week agoThe polio vaccines were live and actually spread polio, please research. Polio was made worse by the vaccines.
I had every known childhood disease that made the rounds during the 1950’s and we were a lot healthier than today’s kids, and we were not chubby tubbies.
Remember when they bleed people? That was thought to be the only way to save people then just like vaccines are thought to save children now. Check out Gardasil, read the dirt on it and the percentage of STD’s it covers. Read it all please.
We are over vaccinating, over medicating, over protecting our children…mom’s have an instinct to protect their children…and these mom’s are doing their best. Do your research.