You've heard all the scary rumors surrounding vaccines:
they cause autism,
they contain toxins.
Even that they can give you the disease they're trying to prevent!
It's misinformation like this that has caused American vaccination rates
to drop significantly over the past couple of decades.
Some people believe their children would be better off in a world without vaccines.
This is WHAT IF,
and here's what would happen if we stopped vaccinations.
Through the years vaccines have been successful
in reducing the spread of deadly diseases
like measles, diphtheria, and rubella
to the point where they've nearly disappeared from America.
When people stop seeing these diseases,
some start to wonder why we're still vaccinating against them.
Well, if you want to see how a so-called controlled disease can make a comeback,
just ask the people of Japan...
Let me paint a picture for you:
it's 1974, in Japan,
and 80% of people were getting the whooping cough vaccine.
With only 393 cases of whooping cough
and zero related deaths throughout the whole country that year,
the Japanese started to let their guard down.
By 1979, only 10% of children were being vaccinated.
Shocked by the whole ordeal, the Japanese quickly turned back to routine vaccination,
and the disease numbers dropped once again.
People usually see the decision not to vaccinate as a very personal, individual matter
thinking they should have the right to be able to control what goes into their child's body.
Sure, we get that;
but what a lot of people don't understand
is that if everyone made that same "individual" decision,
it would have catastrophic effects, and eventually spell far more danger for your child.
The fewer people who get vaccinated, the more opportunities a disease has to spread.
When you decide not to get vaccinated,
you're not only accepting the possibility of contracting a disease yourself,
but also the chance of spreading it to others around you and playing a part in an epidemic.
There are hundreds of thousands of people who can't get vaccinated
due to treatments for cancer and other conditions,
and their safety relies on the rest of us being vaccinated.
The next time someone tries to convince you that vaccines are too dangerous,
just let them consider what our world would look like without vaccines.
We'd be transported back to a world we thought we had overcome,
where life for children was especially brutal.
These are just a handful of the old diseases that would come back to wreak havoc
if we all stopped vaccinations.
So why stop?
There hasn't been a single credible study linking vaccines to long term health conditions.
In fact, the paper that started the theory that vaccines cause autism
was so discredited
that its author lost his medical license!
Maybe one day we'll be able to eradicate all diseases from our planet.
But would new challenges just come to take their place?
Well, that's a topic for another WHAT IF.