Child Vaccinations
Mandatory Law or Personal Choice

By: Courtney Boyd

Childhood vaccinations, a personal choice or mandatory law? The anti-vaccine movement created by parent complaints have made many parents and guardians question the safety and effectiveness of vaccinations. I will discuss the history of vaccines, how vaccinations work, the effects of not receiving vaccines, the exemptions of states, as well as a guide to the age a child should receive each vaccination and the vaccine required.
History of the vaccine
Do you know how long it usually takes for a new vaccine to become available to the public? Scientists and researchers spend many years (10-15) in science laboratories during the first stage of this extensive process. Once this process has been completed, the United States Food and Drug Administration (U.S. F.D.A.) has a series of trials that are conducted on human volunteers. These series are used to test vaccine efficiency, to determine appropriate dosage, and to monitor adverse side effects. That’s not the end though, after these series of tests, the FDA still monitors the vaccine reactions for many years. The first vaccine was not discovered until 1798 by Edward Jenner and was used for vaccination against the smallpox virus. Later on, over a 100 years, Louis Pasteur proved that a disease could be prevented by infecting a person with the weakened germs. Dr. Pasteur used a vaccine on a boy in 1885 to prevent rabies as the child had been bitten once before by a rabid dog. By the 1900’s, there were two human virus vaccines, smallpox and rabies, and three bacterial vaccines against cholera, typhoid, and plague. In the mid-20th century, Jonas Salk, MD, and Albert Sabin, MD, discovered the inactivated polio vaccine as well as the live polio vaccine Vaccinations for fatal diseases such as diphtheria, measles and