Vaccines Should Be Required

“My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you,” said Jesus (New International Version John 15. 12). We are supposed to love one another. Vaccines are a way that God has made people be able to take care of one another. However, vaccines are a highly controversial topic. Whether or not you are for vaccines or against, the facts remain the same: vaccines have always had a small risk, but they save millions of lives. On average, vaccines save 2 million people from dying per year (Chan 2017). About one to two of those people are at risk of having an allergic reaction to vaccines. The life expectancy has more than doubled since vaccines were introduced. For these reasons, vaccines should be required. With vaccines, there will be less sickness. Vaccines also benefit the economy, and they are safe. We should love our neighbors by making vaccines required.

Vaccines can help reduce or even eliminate sickness. Vaccines are made to expose your immune system to a version of a disease where you cannot get seriously sick, but if your immune system ever has to fight off the disease again, it will know how to. In the years since vaccines have been introduced, cases of measles have gone down by 99. 9% from over half a million annually. Cases of mumps have gone down by 98. 7% from 150,000, and cases of smallpox have gone down by 100% from 50,000 (Luong 2019). Some opposers of vaccines say that it is actually better hygiene that has caused disease rates to go down. While hygiene should not be ignored, hygiene alone could not stop disease as well as vaccines do. For example, when the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, around 400,000 people contracted the measles annually. After this, cases of measles dropped by almost 94%, although hygiene improved little at that time (Abraham 2019). Therefore, vaccines reduce sickness.

Another reason vaccines should be required is because they benefit the economy. Childhood vaccination saves 9. 9 billion dollars in direct cost and 43. 3 billion dollars in societal costs. That’s a total of 53. 2 million dollars! The CDC estimates that children who were vaccinated from 1994 to 2018 have generated 406 billion dollars in direct costs. The US saves 27 dollars for every 1 dollar spent on the DTaP vaccine. Furthermore, UNICEF has calculated that a total of 6. 2 billion dollars would be saved in treatment costs if vaccines were more available in impoverished countries (Vercellotti 2019). The reason for this is because it is more expensive for the government to pay for an epidemic or a lot of people getting sick than it is to give them vaccines due to the economy losing billions of dollars. Some people think that vaccines are just money-makers for doctors. This is not true. While doctors are one of the most highly paid professions due to their advanced knowledge and how they can save lives, doctors actually lose money when giving vaccines. The cost of vaccines are more than what most insurance companies pay doctors. On average, vaccines cost over $11 a shot, because of nursing time, billing services, non-routine services, registry use, physician time, supplies, and medical waste disposal. Meanwhile, over one-third of insurance providers pay less than the true cost (Hensley 2011). Therefore, doctors do not make money on vaccines, but America as a whole saves money from vaccines.

Another reason that vaccines should be required is that vaccines are extremely safe and very highly tested. Four different departments in the government test vaccinations before they are recommended: Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), The Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), Post-licensure Rapid Immunization Safety Monitoring System (PRISM), and Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Project (CISA). Even after a particular vaccine becomes recommended to the public, four other departments monitor their effects closely: the Department of Defense (DoD), U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Vaccine Program Office (NVPO) (“Vaccine Safety” 2017). Young children can now be tested to make sure a vaccine will be safe for them to help prevent a reaction (Iannelli, 2019). Other vaccines can be made with the same effect for those allergic to a certain vaccine. Despite extreme testing before recommendation, some people still believe myths like that vaccines cause Autism, Cancer, SIDS, or other sicknesses. In reality, vaccines are very safe. Some vaccines actually help to prevent cancer (“Vaccines (Shots)” 2018). Vaccines contain inactivated or extremely weakened diseases in them, so they cannot make you sick. They simply expose your immune system to a version of the sickness so it can fight it off if it ever comes in contact with an activated, stronger version of the sickness. All exceptions are no longer given in the United States, such as the oral polio vaccine. Therefore, vaccines are safe and cannot make you sick.

In conclusion, it would be wise to require vaccines. There are so many benefits of vaccines and denying vaccinations is risky. What will you believe: facts or fiction? The facts are vaccines save lives and eliminate sickness. They save billions of dollars. Vaccines are incredibly safe and very highly tested. You or a loved one’s life could have been saved by vaccines without you knowing. Vaccines are safe, helpful, and effective.