Anti Vaccination Debate

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The thought of giving your child 19 shots before their 2nd birthday would panic any parent away from vaccinations. Most parents do question if vaccinations are necessary for their children to stay healthy every year. The history of vaccinations started with Edward Jenner during the American Revolutionary War. When settlers moved to the New World, smallpox took a toll on them, causing multiple deaths within their military. Jenner came up with the theory that exposing others to the virus would create immunity for them. He began to administer the virus to healthy soldiers to test his theory. Consequently, it's now required for children to have a series of vaccinations before they are allowed to attend school. This has caused a big controversy …show more content…
In the religion Jainism, they don’t approve of the vaccinations because of the chemistry behind it. The action of killing a virus was enough for the religion to go against it. If a child who’s family follows the Jainism religion attends public school, they would be rejected because of the lack of not getting vaccinated. “...their strong belief in nonviolence, which even makes it difficult for them to take antibiotics, which kill microorganisms.”(Raptor, 2015)The family would claim that this goes against their first amendment. There would now be a court case that would address the issue that many families have to …show more content…
Massachusetts in 1905, the Board of Health required all of their residents to acquire the smallpox vaccine. Jacobson refused to have it done to him and his son because they had a bad reaction to earlier ones. The state decided to charge Jacobson a five dollar fine. Jacobson sued the state of Massachusetts because he felt it was a violation of his 9th amendment, that he had a right to choose to not get vaccinated. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the state. “ We examined conceptions about state power and personal liberty in Jacobson and later cases that expanded, superseded, or even ignored those ideas.” (Mariner,Annas,and Glantz, 2005) Their reasoning was that states had the right to grant the board of heath power to order a general vaccination order during an