Vaccination may have prevented infectious diseases and significantly reduced global mortality rates, but maintaining community confidence to ensure widespread coverage is as important as vaccination itself. There must be a unified effort among community leaders and health care providers in raising the vaccine confidence and acceptance in communities. A good example is how a High Court Judge from the UK who ruled for a mother to vaccinate her children, who have been denied the medication due to their mother's belief.
Emory Vaccine Center director Rafi Ahmed and the associate director Walter Orenstein, said there is a growing fear for the side effects of vaccines, Eureka Alert reported. Although there are no studies proving that vaccination can cause autism, disseminating this information to the skeptics has been very difficult. According to Ahmed and Orenstein out of the 159 measles cases from January 4 to April 2, 2015, 68 were unvaccinated, and 29 of those who didn't have vaccination is due to religious and philosophical beliefs.
The mother from UK who refused to have her children vaccinated is a vegan and believes that the body should heal naturally without injecting metal objects in it, IFL Science reported. However, in the end, Judge Mark Rogers ordered her children to be vaccinated based on the 1989 Children's Act that is more inclined to the welfare of the children. The judge said the mother couldn't provide a doctor that can support her ideals about refusing vaccination.
Meanwhile, Ahmed and Orenstein emphasized that vaccines don't just give individual protection, but community protection as well according to an editorial published in "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). It can stop the spread of disease in a certain community, they said. This is especially true for populations that are vulnerable to diseases, like communities with a lot of children or elderly, or those with people who are immune-compromised.
