Differing opinions shed light on vaccinations
Lawrence Moran, a non-traditional veteran student at the University of Idaho, said he was stunned when a neighbor asked to bring her infant granddaughter into his home to contract chickenpox from his recently ill children.
He said he wondered if she knew there was a vaccine designed for the illness.
Jackson Flynn | Argonaut
Lawrence Moran is a non-traditional UI student who said he
supports vaccinations, but he doesn’t think the government
should require U.S. citizens to get them.
Mike Larson, division administrator for Public Health — Idaho North Central District, said common vaccinations might become an issue of debate in Idaho if large numbers of people are no longer being vaccinated.
Larson said the vaccination debate is not an issue of politics, but an issue of herd immunity being compromised. He said herd immunity is the scientific term for the effect when a significant portion of the population is vaccinated and provides a level of protection for individuals who have not developed immunity.
With the recent outbreak of mumps in the Northwest and the nationwide outbreak of measles this season, Moran said he’s come to terms with how vaccines can be helpful to society.
“If (a) vaccine’s effective, and people take it, the only ones who are going to be at risk are those people who don’t take the vaccine,” Moran said.
Moran said he personally supports vaccination, but is adamantly opposed to governments making vaccines mandatory. He said he thinks it isn’t the government’s place — nor is there anything explicitly written in the constitution giving it the power — to tell an individual he or she needs to undergo a procedure for their own good. He said vaccinations are an issue of choice.
Moran said the vaccine debate parallels the abortion debate. He said women have the choice to carry a child, just as an individual has the control over getting a vaccination or not.
Whether or not he agrees with the choice an individual makes, his opinion should not affect their liberty to make that choice, Moran said.
Moran said he thinks it’s a violation of individual liberty when a government institutes compulsory vaccinations in order to maintain control of a disease within its population.
Larson said he supports the state’s current vaccine recommendations and the option of personal or parental waiver. However, if herd immunity is compromised, thereby compromising public safety, there may need to be a system of mandatory vaccination put into place, Larson said.
Larson said the most common side effects of getting a vaccination are redness and swelling at the sight of injection and an associated fever.
There can be other adverse effects, as is normal with other medications, Larson said.
If there are adverse effects from a vaccination, Larson said people are urged to fill out a vaccine adverse events report (VAERS) through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) so the effects may be collected, analyzed and made available to the public.
There are 28,000 adverse events reported to the CDC each year through the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, according to Epidemiology and Prevention of Vaccine Preventable Diseases 12th Edition, a CDC publication.
Parents and providers in the U.S. are more likely to know someone who experienced an adverse event following immunization than they are to know someone who experienced a vaccine-preventable disease, according to the CDC publication.
Larson said there was a time when thousands of people would die from a single disease, and once vaccines were unveiled for public use they were well received.
The recent public wariness of vaccination has been a byproduct of the success of vaccines, he said, and those currently opposed to vaccination can’t remember a time without life-saving vaccines.
Jake Smith can be reached at [email protected]