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...