Parents Should Vaccinate Their Children

Thanks again to Con for the debate. I may quote him at times during my rebuttal, and so I will put his remarks in italics to distinguish them from my own.CON's CASE"I'm a 18 year old boy, perfectly fine, I've taken only 3 or 4 vaccines in my entire life, and I never had any serious problem whatsoever."This is a cherry-picking fallacy. Just because one person, or even because several people, can live perfectly good lives having taken no or few vaccines does not mean, as a general policy, that it is a good idea to not vaccinate yourself or your children. There are two reasons why this is true. Firstly, the severity of the danger (the risk of catching serious illnesses like measles, chickenpox, or polio) outweigh any supposed benefits to not vaccinating yourself. Even if the risk of catching those diseases is low, these diseases are so serious that it is not worth even taking a low risk of catching them. For instance, before vaccines, measles killed about 545,000 per year, chickenpox killed about 8,900, and polio killed about 3,000. [1, 2, 3] These disease can also severely injure those they don't kill, for example, polio can lead to irreversible paralysis. [4, 5]"In this world there's not right or wrong, there is just point of view. You say it's right to vaccinate, I say it's not, who it's really right?...So, you say that responsibility and obligations it's doing what everyone thinks it's correct, but maybe responsibility it's just freedom, doing what we believe, and not what everyone tells you to do."Pro makes a claim about moral relativism, but offers no philosophical framework or justification to ground his position, so as such, it is unsubstantiated. Moreover, Pro's position would invariably mean that we could never hold anyone accountable for anything because we do "what we believe, and not what everyone tells [us] to do." So, if I believe wantonly torturing people for fun is moral, or if I believed that throwing a baby into a pool and watching them drown is moral, then, according to Pro's logic, I would be justified in doing those things. But clearly, this type of reasoning would lead to a totally unworkable society--morality creates implicit norms of behavior designed to bring order to humanity's chaos, and, therefore, if we were to embrace what Pro is saying, we would subsequently divorce ourselves from morality. In other words, Pro's argument subverts morality, which is not something we should countenance in this debate.But, even if we allow that when things are subjective we should leave people to their own devices (perhaps a more reasonable/charitable interpretation of Con's assertions), then we should still obligate action when things are obvious. The effectiveness of vaccines is not, as Con suggests, an issue of opinion; it is an issue of scientific fact. The overwhelming volume of evidence supports the fact that they work, and because it is fact--not opinion--that they are in the best interests of the child, we can morally compel parents to immunize their children."Who could you say for sure, that vaccines always had been the decisive point of decrease in eradicating diseases."I never made the claim that vaccines were always the "decisive point," I merely claimed that they were significant contributors, and that the facts show them to be effective."From the 40 reasons why you should never vaccinate infants...there are some that I would like to reinforce, like the huge side effects that most of people are unaware of."First of all, you cannot just refer people to a source and tell them to read it themselves, as this could easily be regarded as an attempt to circumvent character limits. Secondly, that source is riddled with innaccuracies. Allow me to point out a couple:The Article Claims: "The mercury, aluminum and live viruses in vaccines is behind the huge epidemic of autism (1 in 10 worldwide as per doctors in the USA), a fact that has been admitted by the US Vaccine Court."Reality: "in the case of Cedillo v. Secretary of Health and Human Services (Case #98-916V), the battle over vaccine injuries moved into the courts. A panel of three special masters began hearing the first cases of the historic Omnibus Autism Proceedings in June 2007. The lead petitioners...claimed that Michelle's autism was caused by a vaccine...On February 12, 2009, the court ruled in three test cases that the combination of the MMR vaccine and thiomersal-containing vaccines were not to blame for autism." [6] In other like cases where the courts ruled in favor of the petitioners, they did not find that the vaccines were dangerous, rather, "the case was conceded without proof of causation." [6]The Article Claims: "Autistic children also suffer from severe bowel disorders. As per Dr Andrew Wakefield, this is due to the vaccine strain live measles virus in the MMR vaccine. Nearly all children become fully autistic after the MMR shot."Reality: "Andrew Jeremy Wakefield...is a British former surgeon and medical researcher, known for his fraudulent 1998 research paper in support of the now-discredited claim that there is a link between the administration of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, and the appearance of autism and bowel disease." [7]There are no citations in the article, and the article of one man, who, as the abovementioned falsities suggest, is merely grasping at straws to make his case, cannot outweigh legions of other scientist and their more credible findings. Moreover, the writer of the article isn't even a medical expert: "Chatterjee was once a journalist with a national English-language daily newspaper in India. He moved on to a public sector company, rising to be a regional director of the company." [8]As for the other sources Con cites, their credibility is equally dubious, and one even admits, "Since they were introduced in the early 20th century, vaccines have been a tremendous medical and scientific success. Today perceived as a necessity, they are so familiar to us that their potential risks are rarely mentioned." Besides, even if you buy that there is an outside risk of autism, the proven benefits of vaccines outweigh that chance.Thus, I affirm.SOURCES1 - http://en.wikipedia.org...2 - http://en.wikipedia.org...3 - http://en.wikipedia.org...4 - http://www.who.int...5 - http://www.ct.gov...6 - http://en.wikipedia.org...7 - http://en.wikipedia.org...8 - http://encyclopediaantivaccinemovement.blogspot.com...