Are Vaccines worth it?

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Vaccines
1. Introduction
Typically, vaccines are mulled at as ancillary, if not unnecessary, precaution. The growing costs of healthcare, coupled by major awareness gaps, have relegated vaccines to background. In recent years, younger households show declining interest in vaccines. The absence of vaccination in employment healthcare benefits has also contributed to current awareness challenge. Notably, emergency and intensive care assume appear to higher priority in US healthcare system. In contrast, protective measures, critical for personal and public healthcare, are, as in vaccines, relegated to background (Gurvits at al.) and are increasingly shown to reflect a dwindling appreciation of vaccines as critical preventive medical intervention (Briggs at al.). The debate over vaccines is divided largely over cost – at major stake to overall personal and public health. By muting equally, if not more, reasons why vaccines are essential, opponents of vaccines characterize, intentionally or not, a major healthcare challenge. Specifically, vaccination is protection. By failing to adopt proper protective measures to ensure personal and public health, individuals and communities face major risks in every possible and imaginable, or not, sense.
First, vaccinations offer protection against potential health risks. This is particularly important for more vulnerable populations including senior patients, pregnant women and
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children. Second, vaccination is cost-effective. As every reasonably educated person knows, early protection saves later higher healthcare costs. Third, vaccination helps protect personal and public health against potential complications and conditions made more complex given country’s diversity. That is, since different racial groups develop different immunities against various diseases and conditions, failing to respond adequately to different protection needs is not only a healthcare risk but, more important, a questionable ethical, if not legal, issue. Fourth, vaccination, from a public health perspective, is a national security issue. Understandably, healthy communities are not only more productive but, more important, are lesser burdens on national healthcare system and, even more important, are capable of enduring a range of non-health risks (e.g. natural disasters, and wars) in more agile and adaptive ways. Interestingly, a growing body of research now shows how challenges in upcoming decades are less about man-made disasters and more about natural, particularly epidemic, challenges. The combination of climate change, rapidly growing populations, and increasingly deteriorating urbanity conditions lays bare what is actually at stake.
For naysayers, probably nothing is more insightful than current, developing COVID-19
crisis.
Essentially, US COVID-19 crisis is a vaccination problem. For years, preventive medicine has not received proper research attention, let alone public funding. Instead, US healthcare system has metamorphosed into a patchwork of increasingly expensive yet unnecessary services promoted by major healthcare providers. The short gains healthcare providers and pharmaceuticals get from current services promoted everywhere – at home, work, and school – only reflect how short-sighted current healthcare policy has become. The outcome
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is, as everyone now can see and grieve, a world’s number one in COVID-19 cases. The day-to-day scenes of people dying and getting sick nationwide is, put differently, a healthcare system failing to offer minimal health protections to people, healthy or not. The vaccination problem, now so glaring under COVID-19, underscores years of lack in investments in protective measures in US healthcare system. To put matter into perspective, a close examination is required of underlying significance of vaccines. More specifically, vaccines are argued for in current research project as not only a recommended protective measure but, more important, as a life-and-death matter. This research project assumes, accordingly, a pro-vaccine position informed by developments in US healthcare system, global virus epidemic challenges and international, collaborative efforts to revive research efforts in preventive medicine.
This research project is made up of four sections, including: (i) Introduction, (ii) Literature Review, (iii) Primary Data, (iv) Analysis, Conclusion & Recommendations. The “Literature Review” section offers a background on current vaccination issues, challenges and opportunities in areas of US healthcare system, global epidemic challenges and international, collaborative efforts to revive research efforts in preventive medicine. The “Primary Data” section offers a presentation on a primary data source, namely a survey, aimed to inform current research effort. The “Analysis, Conclusion & Recommendations” offers an in-depth analysis of collected data, primary and secondary, a personal opinion on vaccination, and, finally, wraps up by a conclusion and a number of recommendations.
2. Literature Review
Historically, vaccines have been a staple in family and public healthcare systems, particularly in developed countries. The public funds provided by federal government, coupled
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by a greater sense of community, helped made vaccination a consistent input across all key healthcare services. In more recent decades, however, privatization of healthcare services and increasingly lesser emphasis on vaccines – and, for that matter, preventive medicine in general – are important has resulted in underfunded disease control agencies and growing lack of awareness and confidence in vaccines. The cost-effectiveness of vaccines cannot, however, cannot be overemphasized given how vaccines, provided early, could lower later and much more expensive healthcare costs. Indeed, vaccination is properly characterized as one most cost-effective healthcare intervention (Rémy, Zöllner and Heckmann). Understandably, accordingly, confidence in vaccines against an increasingly health hazard, i.e. seasonal flu, is shown not only to decline over years but, more important, to question whether vaccines are of any urgent importance (Maurer et al.). The increasing lack of confidence in vaccines extends, moreover, to older children and for necessary vaccines such as HPV and is reported in literature (Gilkey et al.). The challenge of universal and properly funded vaccination programs is also a global one.
In last decade, a range of arbovirus epidemics has overwhelmed healthcare systems worldwide. Notably, Zika, West Nile and chikungunya viruses have highlighted, at substantial human and financial cost, how underfunded disease control agencies, coupled by commercialization of healthcare systems, have resulted in unprecedented, growing risks not only to healthcare system, at a verge of breakdown, but, more important, humans and community safety (Weaver). The global scope of arbovirus – and, for that matter, non-arbovirus epidemics – has initiated a growing body of research on models used to detect, monitor and control emerging infectious diseases (Metcalf and Lessler). The significance of modeling emerging infectious diseases cannot be overemphasized. Indeed, data inputs, collated globally from multiple sources
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help inform such models in order to properly respond to immediate and long-run risks. The
international collaboration in sharing data about infectious diseases is, probably, best evidenced
in current, undergoing efforts to develop vaccines for COVID-19 (Duncan and Lyall).
The growing interdependence across national borders makes vaccination a matter of international collaboration. Historically, more developed countries have made use of local resources in less developed countries in order to develop more effective (and more expensive) cures sold in less developed countries at steep prices. Increasingly criticized as a new form of colonialism, or neocolonialism, international research community has developed a One-World Medicine concept, as opposed to biopiracy, whereby developed and less developed countries collaborate in order to merge traditional medicine from less developed countries and conventional Western medicine to help offer safer and more affordable healthcare practices and for patients worldwide (Efferth et al.). The significance and merits of international collaboration to enhance understanding of emerging diseases – and, in vaccination context, revive research interest and public awareness of vaccines – is, perhaps, put succinctly as follows:
Success in a few countries has fueled efforts to build similar models around the world and to collaborate on an unprecedented scale in large international trials. International collaboration brings opportunity—the more rapid completion o...