WOULD YOU BAN CHILDREN WHO WERE NOT VACCINATED FROM ENTERING SCHOOL?

So without anybody asking us if we would ban children who were not vaccinated from entering school It would sound hard, even something insensitive we could say. But what would happen if our son's life depended on it?

This is what has happened in California, United States, where the father of a child suffering from leukemia has asked the authorities to ban children who have not been vaccinated from entering school.

Group immunity

It seems that the viruses have been engaged in a season in which we talk about them and it is that after the Ebola outbreak last year, the increase in chickenpox cases and the measles outbreak in Disneyland one would say that the viruses are standing war. But the reality is that they have always been there and the main cause for which this news has come to us is none other than the breakdown or weakening that has suffered what we can call group immunityAt least of the last two, Ebola, unfortunately, does not yet have an effective vaccine.

Well, the life of Rhett depends on this group immunity, a six-year-old boy who in 2010 became ill with leukemia. After several cancer treatments, it is finally in regression, but Rhett's immune system has paid a high price during the treatment and is currently regenerating, in fact, it is so weak that it has not been able to be vaccinated and therefore, until that your system does not reinforce contact with a sick person could make you sick and put you in a difficult situation because it is likely that your system could not defend itself properly.

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As if that were not enough, Rhett lives in California where anti-vaccine movements are becoming very popular and it is estimated that the rate of children not cradled in some schools could reach a 20% ratio more than enough to jeopardize group immunity. Luckily, if you can call it that, the school that Rhett attends has a much smaller percentage of 7%, but Rhett only needs a sick child to make his life complicated.

For all these reasons, his father has asked the state school authorities to prohibit the entry into schools of unvaccinated children due to the potential danger they represent. The request has not been accepted by the authorities, which, although they understand the concern of Rhett's father, do not consider this to be a fair measure for the rest of the children, - indeed the children are not to blame for not having been vaccinated- . They also affirm that other potential sources of infection could be stations, stadiums, a supermarket and that they could not close the city to the unvaccinated.

For my part I believe that vaccines, or at least a certain type of them, should be mandatory. Our obligation is to protect our children and make them immune to most of the dangers that we can.

Here is a chart that shows the spread of a disease according to the number of vaccinated individuals in society. Those who are not vaccinated would be blue, those who are vaccinated yellow and those who are ill red. The three scenarios show a society without vaccinated individuals, the middle one with one of its vaccinated members and the last one with the majority of vaccinated individuals.