What are Vaccines?

            Vaccines are weakened pathogens that are inserted into an individuals bloodstream so their body can develop an immunity to them if they were ever to come in contact with the pathogen later on in life. How this is done in a biological sense is that when these weakened pathogens (bacteria or virus) along with antigens are exposed to the persons immune system their body will recognize them as an invader and B-lymphocytes cells will produce antibodies to attach to the pathogen. Which will allow for the rest of the body’s immune system components, mostly the Killer T-cells to locate and exterminate  the pathogen before it gets the chance to duplicate more of itself using your cells machinery which is what makes you symptomatic and danger to others because you risk spreading it to others via droplets from a cough for instance. The first effective vaccine was founded by Edward Jenner in 1796 where he inoculated a young boy from a pox disease called cowpox, also called “vaccinia” which is where the word vaccine got its name from. But it wasn’t until the 1960’s where the first vaccines became licensed and became available for citizen sin the United Sates, among the first of these vaccines was the MMR (Measles-Mumps-Rubella) vaccine which was given to young children since this time and later on will become one of the most controversial topics of the 21st century.

Controversy Surrounding the MMR Vaccine

Anti- Vaccination communities is nothing new here on earth and have been around since the development of the first vaccines which were inefficient and still had dangers related to them because of the instability of keeping a certain location quarantine and clean. In fact, especially in the 18th and 19th century most people were against vaccinations all over the globe for many reasons such as a distrust in medicine at the time, how safety and sanitation were maintained, and the discrepancies it had amongst their faiths. But now the biggest anti-vax movement by far is the one against the MMR vaccines which were licensed in 1971, and ever since then the number of cases of these diseases in the vaccine decreased significantly for the next couple decades. In fact, in the year 2000 measles, one of the diseases contained within the MMR vaccine, was completely eradicated in the United Sates meaning nobody had or contracted the virus from within the US. However, a paper conducted by a British doctor in 1998 would start to gain traction in the early 2000s. The experiment was conducted to see if there was a link between the MMR vaccine and autism and found that there was a statistical significance between the vaccine and childhood autism. This along with celebrities and people in the United Sates who started to denounce this vaccine and claiming that the vaccine caused their children to develop autism would create a bigger following for the anti-vax movement all over the US. Consequently, this would lead to a spike on the number of cases of Measles which went up to almost a 1000 cases in the year of 2015, 15 years after it was eradicated. Now the number of cases of easily preventable diseases is still significantly low in the US but why are some people still content in not vaccinated their kids even after seeing the huge strides and number of millions of lives saved by modern science and medicine?

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