Summary of Nonmedical Exemptions From School Immunization Requirements: A Systemic Review

For this blog post I will summarize one of my sources, Nonmedical Exemptions From School Immunization Requirements: A Systemic Review, using a four step process to pinpoint the most important information from it.

NASA. "Summary of Mars Odyssey mission start". 29 December 2005 via Wikipedia Public Domain 

Step 1: Summarize each section of the article
Being of utmost importance, childhood vaccinations are beneficial to keep more people from contracting contagious diseases.  This is why all 50 states require all children to have proper immunizations prior to entering school.  The states also allow children to be medically exempt from vaccinations and nonmedically exempt, except in two states.  Since there is an increase in nonmedical exemptions, there is also an increase in the risk of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks.  Some states starting the early 2000s have begun allowing philosophical exemptions, on top the medical and religious exemptions, based on a set of rules requiring that the parents provide a statement that they are knowledgeable about vaccine information and still choose to have their children be exempt.

There were studies conducted to provide information on the increase of nonmedical exemptions and how this contributed to the increase in disease risk for other people.  Since the data itself goes on for a few pages, there is simply too much detail to cover, and would seem illogical to provide every statistic.

Rather the main takeaway from the study was that parents who wanted nonmedical exemptions for their children were more likely to be white families that were of higher socioeconomic status.  The problem with many children that are exempt from vaccinations is that many of them tend to be clustered together, mainly in the same geographical location.  The term herd immunity comes and basically means that if there a few individuals who are not immunized and are contagious who are mixed with a large group of individuals who are not immunized but are still healthy, that large group would eventually have many of the non-immunized healthy children become contagious.  If the same scenario played out but included less non-immunized healthy children and they were replaced with immunized healthy children, most would eventually become contagious except for the children that were immunized.  If there were a large group of children that were immunized and mixed with a few non-immunized contagious children, the group would mainly remain immunized and healthy.

A recent study, that is connected to the study in this article, showed how states that have stricter exemption laws tend to have a decrease in parents having their children be exempt from vaccinations and ultimately increasing the number of children to be properly vaccinated.  Some states that have have an easy exemption law for religious exemptions but not philosophical exemptions, tend to have parents that do not want to have their children vaccinated due to philosophical reasons rather than religious ones, use a religious exemption since the process to do so is more simple.

To conclude the information found in this article, the evaluations of how certain states that have new policies regarding stricter vaccination laws, and the parent preferences, certain school-level methods, or exemption rates is needed to be used to enlighten lawmakers when they decide to pursue legislative reforms.  This will be used to truly see what is the cause for having such exemption rates and could potentially help more children receive proper immunizations which could lead to a healthier country.

Step 2: Compile all the points made from step 1 into one or two sentences
The increase in nonmedical exemptions rates is connected with the increase in vaccine-prevented diseases.  These diseases spread in areas that are clusters, geographical locations where many children are not immunized and eventually spread contagious diseases to other children.

Step 3: Revise the points made in step 2, possibly adding to it
To add to what I said in step 2, future legislation to find out the reasons why parents choose to have their children be exempt from vaccinations could be a step in the right direction to eventually inform more parents why vaccinations can be a good thing and provide more children with healthier lives.  Philosophical exemptions, rather than medical and religious exemptions, could have stricter laws preventing them which could result in more children being vaccinated and could decrease the chance for vaccine-preventable diseases to spread.

Step 4: Comparing my summary with a peer
I compared my summary with Jason Wittler and saw some similarities and differences.  We both identified the main evidence in each of the sections that we chose for our sources to be the most important issues of each section which could be used to combine our main claim.  What we did differently was that he summarized each section in on sentence whereas, I compiled many parts to each section into one summary.  Overall, we both identified the main claim for each our sources, an important step to being able to then summarize the main claims for all of the sources that we will use in our first main project.