Cancer: the disease caused by an uncontrolled division of abnormal cells in a part of the body. Cancer, as may of you know, is a deadly disease that has claimed many lives. What many of you may not know is that there is a vaccine out there that can help prevent cancer. This vaccine is for a disease called HPV, one that is responsible for nearly all cervical cancer cases, 95 percent of anal cancers, 70 percent of throat and neck cancers and substantial proportions of vaginal, vulvar and penile cancers. Many states want to make this vaccine mandatory, like many other vaccines, but around four out of five parents are against it.
Anyone who understands how vaccines work would be asking, "Why such a high opposition to the HPV vaccine?" The answer is that this is part of a trend of parents being against vaccines. Many of these parents think that vaccines are just bad for their children. Most prevalent of these reasons is that many parents believe vaccines cause autism, which is from a totally bogus study that has no grasp on reality, and there are at least seven studies that prove vaccines have no correlation with Autism. The reason parents believe vaccines causes Autism is because they think they contain harmful amounts of mercury and thimerosal, which is false because vaccines no longer contain mercury at all, and most, except for a few flu shots, don't contain thimerosal, either. And even if you entertain the idea that vaccines cause autism, the question arises: would you rather your child contract a deadly disease?
The whole anti-vaccination has already been responsible for the resurgence of diseases like measles. Many of these parents don’t seem to understand that just because these diseases weren’t prevalent for a long time doesn’t mean they have gone away. The reason no one got diseases like polio and measles is because nearly everyone is already vaccinated. And even if they aren’t here now, the diseases are only a plane ride away before making it back to the United States. And sadly, the children most at risk are those who are too young to be vaccinated, which is any baby under six months old. Choosing not to vaccinate your child is putting all of those babies at risk, as well as your own child.
It is also interesting to note that the likeliness of a parent vaccinating their child would triple if they knew they could opt out.. Which, time and time again, has proven not to work. More and more parents are using religious reasons to avoid vaccinating their children, or at least delay it, which has led to the aforementioned breakouts. Yet, the states can’t just make vaccines mandatory. (Well, they can, but there would be severe consequences.)
Case in point: back in 2007, Texas tried to make HPV vaccines mandatory for all sixth-grade girls, with an opt-out option. This lead to severe backlash causing it to be vetoed by Republican lobbyists.
The answer to this conundrum is education on vaccines, which is more than necessary. If more parents better understood the benefits of vaccines, and the myth about the cons, then maybe the approval ratings would go up.
