Vaccines Are Good!!

In the world of vaccinations, there is a big debate on whether or not to get your kids vaccinated. Now I have my own opinions on the situation and from the title I think you can gather my stance on it, but from my first blog post I finally understood where the hysteria arose from. When it comes to trying to convince people that vaccines are good and actually beneficial to our society, I think it is useful to understand the topic of herd immunity, where a specific number of people in the population are vaccinated to prevent the transmission to those who are not vaccinated. I believe it is in our best interest to educate people about how we almost wiped out so many diseases from the face of the earth. But sadly because people decided to stop vaccinating their children we are now faced with these diseases coming back up in sporadic causes, as well as some populations having very little immunity to certain diseases.

From the readings we were assigned this week I learned about the complexity of vaccines and how there are various different types that act on different parts of the immune system to help prepare our bodies in case we come in contact with the real disease. One of them was the two different types of polio vaccines that were available. The IPV is the inactivated polio virus while the OPV is taken orally and contains attenuated strains. According to the CDC, the only form of the vaccine that has been used here in the United States in recent years is the IPV. This kind of surprised me because in the book it talks about how OPV targets the throat epithelial cells cells better and inactivates the poliovirus before it has time to infect the cells. This lead me to do some more research about why exactly we don’t use the OPV form anymore. From this article, I learned that there is a circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus (cVDPs) that stems from receiving a form of OPV. These strains of poliovirus can emerge and spread to a population of under-immunized people and sadly are resulting in paralysis. The data in the article also shows that between the two recording increments, over two years, the number of cVDPs about tripled. These outbreaks are occurring in countries mainly in Africa, where they have a low immunity and the CDC is expressing that in order to stop the emergence of these strains infected other countries, they must sustain a high population immunity by getting vaccinated.

When looking for what is being done right now to help vaccinate and prevent the further spread of the Poliovirus, I found out the United Nations Secretary General started along a journey to vaccinate children in Pakistan. According to the source, the Polio campaign estimates to vaccinate 39 million children across the country. Pakistan was hit hard with emergence of the polio virus in 2019 and already have 17 cases in 2020. Hopefully with this campaign and the growing support from, within in the country itself and other countries, they will meet their goal of eradicating the Poliovirus there. And hopefully other countries start enacting initiatives like this one not only for the poliovirus but other diseases that can simply be prevented with a vaccine.