Pro Vaccination Argumentative Essay

Eighty seven percent of women and eighty one percent of men become parents at some point during their working lives (aaup.org). That is a pretty high percentage of people whose lives change when they find out they are expecting a child. You suddenly become responsible for another human being. A part of that responsibility is making extremely important decisions that will affect your child’s health and wellbeing, such as deciding whether or not you want to get your child vaccinated. This has been an ongoing debate for decades, but only in the last decade has it become at the forefront of American political discussion. Both sides of the debate have positives and negatives, but the real question is: which choice is ultimately better for your child?

Whilst doing my research on this topic, I came across a very moving article by a mother who had been anti-vaccination but after doing some intense research and collecting real science, switched over to the pro-vaccination side of the debate. During her research, she stumbled upon statistics such as: Pertussis killed an estimated 200,752 people annually pre-vaccination era, but only 13,506 annually post-vaccination era. That is a
Before the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1963, hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. contracted the disease annually; but since 1963, reported cases fell to less than a thousand a year. Things began to change in 1998 when a British physician published a study that falsely asserted a connection between autism and the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine. Further investigation into the work revealed the the research was unethical and full of conflicts of interest. The article was filled with false data, and the health care risks described have been discredited. However, the damage had been done. In the U.S., new measles cases have tripled as of 2013