Immunization in pediatrics in America. Personal Belief Exemptions from School Vaccination Requirements

Personal Belief Exemptions from School Vaccination Requirements
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Personal Belief Exemptions from School Vaccination Requirements
Purpose of the Policy
The purpose of immunizing children is centered on the best interest of the child. Dreyer, the President of AAP points out that all pediatricians care about each individual child in their practice and since they understand that vaccines are critical in protecting children against diseases, they recommend and support immunization of children because no child should suffer from a preventable disease CITATION Ame16 \l 1033 (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2016). Additionally, the community immunity id dependent on high immunization to ensure no disease outbreak where children live, learn and play. Therefore, the primary objective of immunization is boosting immunity of children to resist any preventable disease and by extension protect the community by making it mandatory for school going children to be immunized. The community is protected by immunizing all children to have the immunity to ensure they can resist some diseases because the any confirmed case of an attack on a single individual is a threat to the community. These diseases are highly contagious and therefore immunity must be addressed at the community level and at an individual level. Therefore, herd immunity is an objective to protect the people against an outbreak of an epidemic.
The decision makers should act in the interest of the child by ensuring that the child is immunized. He/she can also seek professional help from a health professional on the importance of vaccinations and what the children should be immunized against. The decision maker ought to also act in the best interest of the community since immunization contributes to the herd immunity. Vaccination also helps protect the health of classmates, friends, relatives, and others in the community CITATION Cen18 \l 1033 (Center For Disease Control and Prevention, 2018). Therefore, ensuring that the child is immunized is ensuring that the child is not the weak link in case of the disease outbreak.
The Decision Makers
The decision maker, in this case, should find a way to act in the best interest of the child which is protecting him or her from diseases that have known and approved vaccines. There are several decision makers targeted by this policy. First the parents, who are instructed to ensure that their children are immunized for the good of the child and the community. However, pediatricians are not decision makers but they ought to advise parents on the importance of vaccinations.
Parents are the appropriate persons to make decisions about their children concerning their health choices. Some parents opt not to have their children immunized. Parents decide for their children whether to refuse of discontinue treatments even though it is life-sustaining. Each decision made by a parent must be in the best interest of the child and if there is sufficient evidence to prove that it is not in the best interest of the child it ought to be challenged. Decisions that are clearly not in a child's best interest can and should be challenged because they make the child vulnerable to these diseases and threatens the herd immu...