Should Government Require Childhood Vaccinations?
This essay argues that governments have both a moral and public-health obligation to require parents to vaccinate their children. Drawing on the histories of smallpox and polio eradication, the paper demonstrates how scientifically rigorous vaccines have saved millions of lives. It then examines the anti-vaccination movement — including celebrity-driven claims linking vaccines to autism — and identifies three core flaws in that position: reliance on pseudoscience, confusion of correlation with causation, and misunderstanding of the scientific approval process. The essay concludes that, as with historical mandates against smallpox, individual freedoms must sometimes yield to the collective good when public-health stakes are sufficiently high.
- Introduction: The Importance and History of Vaccinations: Smallpox history and Jenner's pioneering vaccine work
- The Polio Vaccine and Its Impact: Polio epidemic, Roosevelt's role, and Salk's vaccine
- Why Some People Oppose Vaccinations: Anti-vaccine movement, celebrities, and autism claims
- Criticism of Anti-Vaccination Claims: Three logical flaws in anti-vaccination arguments
- Discussion and Conclusion: Government mandate justified by public health stakes
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What makes this paper effective
- Uses vivid historical narrative — the stories of Roosevelt, Salk, and Jenner — to ground abstract policy arguments in concrete human experience.
- Acknowledges the opposition's position charitably before methodically refuting it across three distinct logical categories, giving the argument intellectual credibility.
- Connects historical precedent (1853 British smallpox law, U.S. school-entry requirements) directly to the policy conclusion, showing that mandatory vaccination is not a novel overreach.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper employs a classic concession-and-rebuttal structure: it grants that rare vaccine injuries occur and that some parental concerns have surface plausibility, then systematically dismantles each objection using the standards of scientific reasoning. This technique strengthens rather than weakens the central argument by demonstrating intellectual honesty.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a brief thesis statement before moving into two historical sections covering smallpox and polio. A dedicated section presents the anti-vaccination viewpoint fairly. The following section rebuts those views across three numbered categories (pseudoscience reliance, causal confusion, and misunderstanding of scientific process). A combined discussion and conclusion restates the thesis in light of the evidence and historical legal precedents, calling for government mandates.
Introduction: The Importance and History of Vaccinations
We live in the 2000s, not in the pre- and early 1950s, when polio was a disease feared as intensely as cancer is today. It is partly thanks to a determined president living with disability, to the public's desire to eliminate the disease, and to the courageous and resilient Dr. Jonas Salk that polio was mastered. The elimination of polio was based on a single vaccine that had been thoroughly tested before it could be administered to even one individual. The vaccine's repeated success makes it a valuable and reliable intervention. Vaccines, therefore, are not only helpful but also critical tools for eliminating and preventing national — if not global — scourges. It is the argument of this essay that government should do all that it can to require unwilling parents to vaccinate their children for the good of the country.
Smallpox was the first disease for which a vaccination was successfully produced. It was introduced in 1796 by Dr. Edward Jenner, although others had originally tried and failed (Lombard & Pastoret, 2007). Louis Pasteur later improved the process through his pioneering work in microbiology. Vaccinations were named in part due to the work done using them on cows (from the Latin vacca, meaning cow). Smallpox had been a major disease, killing at one time between 20 and 60 percent of infected adults and at least 80 percent of infected children. It was the cancer of that era (Riedel, 2005). It was finally eradicated only comparatively recently, in 1979, but by that time it had killed between 300 and 500 million people in the twentieth century alone. It was vaccination that brought it to an end (Koplow, 2003).
Other vaccinations have also proved enormously effective. The influenza vaccine, the HPV vaccine, and the chicken pox vaccine have all been rigorously tested and demonstrated to prevent disease (e.g., Fiore et al., 2009). Over and again, careful longitudinal and cross-sectional studies have shown that vaccination is the most reliable and effective strategy for preventing the spread of infectious disease (American Medical Association, 2000).
The Polio Vaccine and Its Impact
Poliomyelitis — or infantile paralysis, since most victims were quite young when stricken — has been present for millennia. The polio epidemic struck America four times beginning in 1916, and each time there was a mysterious wave of children becoming paralyzed and often dying. Children were institutionalized; they were fitted with iron braces; they were taunted; they lost many of their physical capacities to the disease. Some of them died. Families were impoverished trying to find a cure and care for their stricken loved ones. The documentary A Paralyzing Fear: The Story of Polio in America records one family in which six of their eight children were struck with polio. It was a source of disability and social stigma. The disease was so malignant and poorly understood that the government scoured laboratories for an answer and, finding none, blamed the illness on dirt and unhygienic conditions. In desperation, the New York City government washed the streets with millions of gallons of water and killed thousands of stray cats, not knowing what else to do.
Fortunately, a wealthy and influential man who would later become president — Franklin Delano Roosevelt — contracted this same disease and dedicated himself to healing both himself and the country from it. Keeping his illness largely hidden from public view (he might never have been elected president had he fully disclosed it), he collaborated with Hugh Gallagher, the author of Splendid Deception and himself a person living with polio, promoted scientific efforts to defeat the disease, and founded the Georgia spa known as Warm Springs.
The scientific competition to develop a vaccine lay between two researchers: Dr. Albert Sabin and Dr. Jonas Salk. Dr. Salk argued for using a killed polio virus as a vaccine; Dr. Sabin argued for using a weakened (attenuated) live virus. Dr. Salk's vaccine was adopted, but he was later ostracized when a new batch — unknown to him — apparently contained virus that had not been fully inactivated, and some of those immunized contracted polio. This was not the first such setback: another scientist in the early 1930s had developed a candidate polio vaccine but, with limited understanding of the disease, had inadvertently infected rather than protected recipients. Fortunately, Dr. Salk persisted, and the ostracized scientist became a nationally and globally acclaimed figure, winning lasting fame and the world's gratitude.
Why Some People Oppose Vaccinations
Some people oppose vaccines on scientific, medical, ethical, religious, and other grounds, including objections to government interference in private family decisions (Wolfe & Sharp, 2002). In the early 1990s, and in step with a growing pseudo-scientific climate and the rising popularity of the Internet, some parents began blaming their children's autism on vaccines. One such parent was Jennifer Margulis, featured in the PBS documentary The Vaccine War. Her account shifted over time: she first reported that her son's autism was the direct result of a particular vaccination, then later attributed it to an accumulation of toxins from multiple vaccines.
Two celebrities, Jenny McCarthy and J.B. Handley, along with two organizations — the National Vaccine Information Center and Generation Rescue — joined the anti-vaccine movement. Adding to the public furor were pseudo-scientific websites and pages created by other concerned parents who refused to inoculate their children, claiming that vaccines contain toxins that cause autism.
In rare cases, vaccinations have injured people, but the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program provides compensation for such injuries, and each case is carefully investigated while research is conducted to prevent recurrence. Modern policies grant exemptions for people who have documented medical reactions to vaccinations, compromised immune systems, or strong conscientious objections. It is controversial, however, whether the last category should be permitted, especially since such objections are often based on pseudoscientific myths.
References
American Medical Association. (2000). Vaccines and infectious diseases: Putting risk into perspective. http://www.immunizationinfo.org/es/pressroom/2000-06-01/vaccines-and-infectious-diseases-putting-risk-perspective
A Paralyzing Fear: The Story of Polio in America. http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/a_paralyzing_fear
A Paralyzing Fear: The Story of Polio in America [VHS]. (1998). http://www.amazon.com/Paralyzing-Fear-Story-Polio-America/dp/B00000I4W0
Fiore, A. E., Bridges, C. B., & Cox, N. J. (2009). Seasonal influenza vaccines. Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology, 333, 43–82.
Goldstein, M. (1978). How we know: An exploration of the scientific process. Plenum Press.
Koplow, D. A. (2003). Smallpox: The fight to eradicate a global scourge. University of California Press.
Lombard, M., Pastoret, P. P., & Moulin, A. M. (2007). A brief history of vaccines and vaccination. Revue Scientifique et Technique de l'Office International des Épizooties, 26(1), 29–48.
PBS. The Vaccine War. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi9SMj2PUbg
Riedel, S. (2005). Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination. Proceedings (Baylor University Medical Center), 18(1), 21–25.
Wolfe, R., & Sharp, L. (2002). Anti-vaccinationists past and present. BMJ, 325(7361), 430–432.
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