Individual Rights & Vaccination Policy
The control of communicable diseases requires public health interventions that, more often than not, intrude on an individual’s rights. Such is inevitable since communicable diseases can be spread from an infected person to other healthy people which ultimately jeopardizes other people’s lives. Therefore, it is necessary to clearly understand the ethical dilemmas that come to play when deciding whether to respect a person’s rights or protect the general public’s lives (Beazley, 2020). In this case, a vaccination policy may imply that it will be mandatory for all children to be vaccinated. Some parents may support this, while others may reject this policy due to various reasons.
As children do not have the power to make decisions for themselves, parents are often left with that responsibility. Many parents who are anti-vaccination will often give reasons such, as they know what is best for their children, natural immunity is better than unnatural immunity, among others. Such reasons may be a result of personal experiences or even illiteracy. It is vital for such parents to understand that vaccination protects their children from diseases and protects other children. The issue of compromising individual rights, such as those of parents that entail vaccination of their children, can be argued from a distributive justice point of view. Everyone who is in a position to be vaccinated, including children, should do so to benefit from the protection vaccines give against infectious diseases through herd immunity (Hendrix et al., 2016).
Vaccinations being a type of preventive medicine, often relies on responses that are communitarian, thus the name herd immunity. Mass vaccinations, therefore, offer herd immunity in the sense that it offers protection to people who are not vaccinated through those who are vaccinated. This ensures protection due to the fact that the vaccinated are least likely to be infected, moreover lowering the danger of infections to those who are unvaccinated. In addition, herd immunity is vital for the success of a vaccine which may call for the compromising of parents’ right to autonomy in deciding whether to vaccinate their children (Beazley, 2020). Such is because children who remain unvaccinated are more prone to communicable diseases, which causes extra costs for the parents that they could have avoided through vaccinations.
Parents who are against their children being vaccinated against communicable diseases should be held accountable both legally and financially for decisions like that. Such can be argued as failure to act in a way that would potentially protect their children from harm and preserve their state of well-being. All children have a right to life and proper health, which is infringed on by a lack of vaccination (Hendrix et al., 2016).
In addition, it is crucial to strike a balance between respecting parents’ autonomy and rights and maximizing the greater good of society in terms of vaccination and health. While individual rights should be upheld, it should be noted that the same could potentially pose significant threats to public health at large. Thus, the necessary stakeholders should put in place appropriate policies to educate on the benefits of vaccines to lessen the severity and stop outbreaks altogether.
References
Beazley, A. (2020). Contagion, containment, consent: infectious disease pandemics and the ethics, rights, and legality of state-enforced vaccination. Journal Of Law And The Biosciences, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/jlb/lsaa021
Hendrix, K., Sturm, L., Zimet, G., & Meslin, E. (2016). Ethics and Childhood Vaccination Policy in the United States. American Journal Of Public Health. https://doi.org/10.2105%2FAJPH.2015.302952
ORDER A PLAGIARISM-FREE PAPER HERE
We’ll write everything from scratch
Question 
discuss School board trustees requesting public comment before they vote on a vaccination policy for all children in a local school district.
Individual Rights & Vaccination Policy
Should individual rights (e.g., parents’ rights to decide whether to vaccinate their children) be compromised to control the spread of communicable diseases for the good of society?