The Ethics of Vaccination

There's a slowly growing trend in the United States for parents to forgo immunizing their kids. This is due to an unfounded concern that something in the vaccines can cause autism.

What I want to know is if these parents should be held responsible for child endangerment and/or neglect?

Historically, vaccinations have followed a certain trend in countries all over the world:

1) A vaccine is created and administered.
2) The disease ceases to be a threat to the general population.
3) A generation of people grow up unaware of just how horrible the disease they were immunized against really is.
4) This generation starts to focus more on the supposed negative effects of vaccinations instead of the benefits.
5)A large percentage of parents opt to not vaccinate their children, which leads to an epidemic of the preventable disease.
6) People start to immunize their kids again.
7)The supposed negative effects of vaccines are proven to be false.

And here we go again! Same bullshit, different day. Naturally, people are unaware that this debate has been going on since the conception of the first vaccine. And its always ended the same way: Two stupid parents watching their child die from a preventable disease!

It makes me angry to know there are people out there who would rather listen to Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy (two figureheads of the "vaccinations cause autism" movement) instead of their doctors. Though Carrey and McCarthy may not be totally against the practice of immunization, their fear-mongering has and will continue to dissuade parents from vaccinating their children at all.

The American habit of believing in things for faulty reasons is going to far this time. Not only are parents putting the health of their own children at risk, but their putting the health of other children at risk as well.

Infants who are too young to receive all of their vaccinations benefit greatly from public immunity. Needless to say, if an epidemic of a preventable disease breaks out, the infant population is at a high level of risk for catching this disease.

Now, if an infant suffers or dies from a preventable disease, and if the disease could be traced back to another child who was not immunized by his parents, then is it not fair to hold the parents responsible?

Note: Since such a large percentage of children are immunized, we really can't know for certain if vaccinations can cause autism or not. Undertaking a study on the issue would require researchers to deny vaccinations to the children they are studying, which would be unethical. As such, we would have to wait until a large percentage of parents start to forgo vaccinations in order to see what happens to the rate of autism. As such, neither side of the debate has the data necessary to fully back up their claim (though from a historical perspective, the pro-vaccination side has always been right. Furthermore, even if 1 out of 100 kids develop autism due to vaccinations, the benefits to the general public still outweigh the risks).