Vaccinations are an essential part of human evolution; we need vaccines to help build immunity against diseases that threaten the overall human population. The idea of vaccines is to essentially eradicate a disease by providing dosages of the vaccine shots to try and achieve a ‘herd immunity’ against them. An example of this would be the polio vaccine, children all around the world are mandatorily administered the poliovirus and in 2022 it has come to the point where polio has almost been eradicated from our threatening diseases list.
But as it goes with most situations, there’s always a group of people who either fear the change or just do not believe in it, for us this comes in the form of the Anti-Vaxx Community.
Predating the pandemic there have been many instances of people refusing vaccinations, one of the first of these instances can be seen in the form of a Sermon by Edmund Massey which was titled “A sermon against the dangerous and sinful practice of inoculation”, he believed that it would sinfully alter the course of nature and that people are not meant to change the will of God. This thought carried on and eventually became propaganda led by a group of people who would very explicitly try and inform others of the ‘dangers’ the vaccine poses.
In 1998 a paper by Andrew Wakefield wrongfully linked the MMR vaccine to the effects of autism and was withdrawn because of its inaccuracies, but this paper garnered much attention and only fuelled anti-vax propaganda. The number of anti-vaxxers has been rapidly increasing and the rise of social media has only further pushed their uneducated reach beyond control. “Surveys from the American Academy of Paediatrics found that the rate of parents who refused one or more recommended vaccines increased from 9.1% in 2006 to a staggering 16.7% in 2013” (Benoit and Mauldin, 2021) Many of us use the internet as the source of information when it comes to health, but with the spread of accessibility also comes the spread of false news. “There are an estimated 58 million followers on anti-vaccination pages across social media” (Armitage, 2021)
We have seen this widely spread with the covid-19 pandemic as well, many vaccine deniers took to the streets to spread their ‘knowledge’ about the vaccine, they claimed that the vaccines do not work and are not safe to be taken by anyone. They’ve also gone ahead to spread the idea that the covid-19 vaccine actually contains a micro-chip planted by the governments to monitor and track the citizens.
The spread of this thought should be curbed, vaccines are not inherently made to harm public health, rather improve the overall standard of health.
References:
- Benoit, S.L. and Mauldin, R.F. (2021). The “anti-vax” movement: a quantitative report on vaccine beliefs and knowledge across social media. BMC Public Health, [online] 21(1). Available at: https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-021-12114-8#Sec1.
2. Armitage, R. (2021). Online “anti-vax” campaigns and COVID-19: censorship is not the solution. Public Health, [online] 190, pp.e29–e30. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033350620305242?via%3Dihub
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