The development and use of vaccines have allowed the global population to mitigate the spread of severe illnesses and significantly reduce child mortality. Still, there are groups of people who believe that vaccines are harmful and oppose immunization, not allowing their children to be vaccinated. The controversy regarding childhood immunization is connected to the caregiver’s fear that vaccines may cause harm, infect the child with the disease, or cause serious side effects. According to the American Allergy Asthma and Immunology Academy (2019), a common controversy is a belief that vaccines are linked to autism or infant death. However, in reality, each vaccine each thoroughly tested, and all side effects are documented before it is used in immunization. Another misconception is that vaccines infect a child with a disease, which can cause them to feel sick and experience all symptoms of a condition. This is not true because most vaccines use inactive organisms are in some rare cases, they may cause some symptoms (the American Allergy Asthma and Immunology Academy, 2019). Hence, the recent controversies about vaccines are a result of misconceptions about this method of preventing an illness.
The potential effect of this controversy on community health is broad since one of the benefits of vaccines is that they allow stopping the diseases from spreading. Immunization is the primary prevention strategy for many conditions aimed at protecting people’s bodies from being infected (Edelman et al., 2019). The more people are vaccinated against an illness, and the lesser individuals will get infected since they will not be in contact with the viruses or bacteria. Hence, stopping child immunization would mean that some illnesses that have not been an issue for the general population, for example, measles, will emerge as a public health concern again. Herd immunity against conditions such as polio can be achieved only if a significant proportion of children are vaccinated, which is why the vaccine controversy is potentially dangerous.
References
American Allergy Asthma and Immunology Academy. (2019). Vaccines: The myths and the facts. Web.
Elderman, C. L., Mandle, C. L., & Kudzma, E. C. (2019). Health promotion throughout the life span (8th ed). Elsevier Molsby.