MMR Vaccine Scandal

Today, there is an ongoing debate on whether children should be vaccinated. It is recommended to be vaccinated in order to give people’s bodies the advantage of fighting against diseases that can be very detrimental to health. You would think that everyone would desire to be healthy and desire for their bodies to be able to fight against disease, but sadly, everyone doesn’t think the same. The planting of this anti-vaccination mindset stemmed from a man named Andrew Wakefield in 1998. After his “discovery”, many turned away from vaccinating their children.

Andrew Wakefield, who was a gastroenterologist at the Royal Free Hospital in London, published a case series claiming that administering the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine caused children to become autistic. He studied 12 children, 11 of those children were boys, whose parents he claimed brought them in for medical attention due to behavioral changes. With just this prior information, there are many red flags that should have been waved by not only those who published his findings, but those who read it. The sample size was too small and very biased with there being an overwhelming amount of males and being from one medical center. But if it is in The Lancet, a peer-reviewed journal, then it must be absolutely true, right? This began a frenzy, and the MMR vaccine rates dropped because parents were scared that their children would become autistic. The paper was not retracted until February 2010 on the basis that several elements of the paper was false and Andrew Wakefield ignored ethical clearances. So, everyone should now know that vaccinating their children is the safe and important? Obviously not!

Even 10 years after the discovery, there are still people who choose not to vaccinate their children leaving them vulnerable to very nasty diseases. The benefits of vaccines heavily weigh against the risks, which definitely do not include autism. People are so dependent on technology that turning to the internet for answers is the way of life. Of course, the internet is notorious for being slightly false in some situations, but we continue to hold it words as the reigning truth. For example, if the internet says “vaccines are terrible”, many people believe it. But the reluctancy to vaccinated is taking a toll on global health. At first, herd immunity was a safety net, meaning that as long as a community was vaccinated, one or two people wouldn’t be a risk to their health. With the vaccination rates constantly dropping, it is now reversed where a community is not vaccinated and one or two are. Globally, disease like tuberculosis and malaria that were major problems in the past, and were eradicated or incident cases dropped dramatically, are starting to reemerge because people fail to shield themselves from it. Why continue to disease when there is such a simple solution?