Immunization in pediatrics in America. Personal Belief Exemptions from School Vaccination Requirements

Personal Belief Exemptions from School Vaccination Requirements
Name:
Institution:
Date:
Personal Belief Exemptions from School Vaccination Requirements
Purpose of the Policy
The purpose of immunizing children is centered on the best interest of the child. Dreyer, the President of AAP points out that all pediatricians care about each individual child in their practice and since they understand that vaccines are critical in protecting children against diseases, they recommend and support immunization of children because no child should suffer from a preventable disease CITATION Ame16 \l 1033 (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2016). Additionally, the community immunity id dependent on high immunization to ensure no disease outbreak where children live, learn and play. Therefore, the primary objective of immunization is boosting immunity of children to resist any preventable disease and by extension protect the community by making it mandatory for school going children to be immunized. The community is protected by immunizing all children to have the immunity to ensure they can resist some diseases because the any confirmed case of an attack on a single individual is a threat to the community. These diseases are highly contagious and therefore immunity must be addressed at the community level and at an individual level. Therefore, herd immunity is an objective to protect the people against an outbreak of an epidemic.
The decision makers should act in the interest of the child by ensuring that the child is immunized. He/she can also seek professional help from a health professional on the importance of vaccinations and what the children should be immunized against. The decision maker ought to also act in the best interest of the community since immunization contributes to the herd immunity. Vaccination also helps protect the health of classmates, friends, relatives, and others in the community CITATION Cen18 \l 1033 (Center For Disease Control and Prevention, 2018). Therefore, ensuring that the child is immunized is ensuring that the child is not the weak link in case of the disease outbreak.
The Decision Makers
The decision maker, in this case, should find a way to act in the best interest of the child which is protecting him or her from diseases that have known and approved vaccines. There are several decision makers targeted by this policy. First the parents, who are instructed to ensure that their children are immunized for the good of the child and the community. However, pediatricians are not decision makers but they ought to advise parents on the importance of vaccinations.
Parents are the appropriate persons to make decisions about their children concerning their health choices. Some parents opt not to have their children immunized. Parents decide for their children whether to refuse of discontinue treatments even though it is life-sustaining. Each decision made by a parent must be in the best interest of the child and if there is sufficient evidence to prove that it is not in the best interest of the child it ought to be challenged. Decisions that are clearly not in a child's best interest can and should be challenged because they make the child vulnerable to these diseases and threatens the herd immunity level.
Problem Description
The issue is parents make choices for their children which might not be in the best interest of the child. Some children are not immunized because their parents are concerned about the effects of these vaccines on their children while others have religious reasons. There is sufficient evidence dated for centuries that immunization works and therefore children ought to be immunized. The reasons why some parents do not want to immunize their children are not medical and they pose a threat to the child and the community. This is a costly mistake that threatens the community immunity. It is a choice that costs the community indirectly in case of a preventable outbreak. In some cases, these diseases cost many lives just like they used to do several decades and centuries ago.
First, it affects the child who has not been immunized. The child is vulnerable to preventable and potentially deadly diseases. Additionally, an unimmunized person can compromise the herd immunity and affect more people around. The importance of getting everyone immunized is to protect those who cannot be vaccinated or their immunity didn’t respond appropriately to the vaccine or it waned over time.
Policy History
Since When vaccination for smallpox was discovered in 18th century, the European countries governments tried to institute policies which ensured higher vaccination of children against the epidemic. It was mandatory for school going children to be immunized. The united states adopted the policies which led to a significant likelihood of epidemics. Over the years, municipalities and state governments made it mandatory for school going children to be immunized. As more vaccines were discovered, the legal framework was expanded to accommodate the new vaccines. By 1980 there was some legal framework in each state that necessitated vaccination as a requirement to attend school. There has always been resistance for policies requiring parents to immunize their children to attend school. Wherever these laws were established, some parents respond by navigating these regulations by sending their children to private schools or denying them schooling altogether, making fake vaccination scars, wiping the vaccination from the children arms among other dubious things to avoid having their children vaccinated CITATION Wil11 \l 1033 (Willrich, 2011). There are some states and municipalities which yielded to the pressure of anti-vacationists. One of them was Massachusetts who allowed children to join school without being immunized provided they had a signed certificate by a physician which showed they were ‘unfit for vaccination.’
Solution
Indeed, personal exemption policies curtail the efforts of pediatric immunization in the United States and thus risking the escalation and spread of preventable diseases such as measles or smallpox. Exemptions from pediatric or children vaccinations based personal beliefs against its administration are on the rise in most American states. According to the center for disease control (CDC), the rate of children’s exemption from vaccination due to their parents’ persona...