Public School Vaccination Essay

The biggest down fall to public school immunization policy is that religious reasoning is an exception for vaccinations without question. A student, who may or may not even have the correct religious reasoning, can go to public school without vaccinations and infect a student who has probable medical cause to be exempted. At Meadow Glenn Elementary in Lexington, South Carolina, "two students have medicinal reasoning for exemptions, while 22 students have religious reasoning..." (Branning). Those 22 religious exemptions are putting the two medical exemptions in potentially serious danger. Medical exemptions are medical issues that are not preventable and diagnosed by a doctor; however, religious exemptions are not questioned nor confirmed by a religious figure. As more religious exemptions get added to schools, the number of unvaccinated students start to skyrocket. According to Journal of Health Politics, Policy & Law,
After conducting research on Colorado schools with outbreaks of pertussis, Feikin complies all the research and writes in an academic journal, “Schools with pertussis outbreaks had more exemptors (mean, 4.3% of students) than schools without outbreaks (1. 5% of students). At least 11% of vaccinated children in measles outbreaks acquired infection through contact with an exemptor.” (Feikin DR). Pertussis, also known as whooping cough, is a well-known disease that can become very deadly. According to Feikin, a school that has 2.8% more students that were exempted from vaccinations had an outbreak of whooping cough versus a school that has had no reports of any sort of preventable outbreak. In addition, students who were vaccinated still caught the infectious disease due to contact with a non-vaccinated student. The non-vaccinated students are posing a threat to all humans in school system due to the ease of contracting a dangerous disease without