By: Lexton Lee

Vaccines have been used by humans since their discovery by Edward Jenner in 1796. We’ve all heard about them, but are they dangerous? Yes and no. They can be dangerous, and can even cause side effects and allergies. On the other hand, they also prevent a lot of dangers, which I will explain in the paragraph below.

So how do vaccines work? When your body gets invaded, dendritic cells try to figure out which type of pathogen is invading, recognize them, and activate your super weapons. But this activation takes a very long time to wreak havoc. You probably remember when you were a kid you got a cold practically every week. However now you’re older, you almost never get the cold. Why is that? One reason: is memory cells. Memory cells are cells that remember.

They remember the enemies that attack. So they can immediately activate your super weapons to kill the intruders, instead of taking the long process of detection over and over again. However, we don’t want to go through the process of going through a disease just so that the memory cells will recognize it. Instead, we use vaccines. Vaccines are weakened or dead pathogens that we inject into our body to make enough memory cells to fight the virus when we actually get it.

So about the side effects are the dangerous well Kurzgesagt, a science youtube channel that reaches out to scientists that are good in that type of science. So they did a simulation with 20,000,000 children with measles. The side effects were: 98 percent got a high fever with a rash. 8 percent got dangerous diarrhea. 7 percent end up with ear damage or permanent hearing loss. 6 percent get pneumonia. 0.1 percent get encephalitis, and .025 percent received SSPE which is highly deadly. So what are the results? Well, over 2.5 million have serious side effects and about 20,000 children die. So then we repeat the process but now they’re all vaccinated. Out of the 20,000,000 children, 10 percent get a high fever, and 5 percent get a rash. 0.001 percent get a serious allergic reaction. 10 boys get inflamed Genitalia and another 10 kids get encephalitis. Out of the vaccinated kids, about 120 kids have somewhat dangerous side effects and none died.

In summary, should you get vaccines? In my opinion, I would say yes. Getting vaccines will stop the virus from spreading or reawaken old diseases that can spread again. It can also keep you safe. The effect of not getting vaccines can have a child die and what’s guaranteed is that they will have a bad time and even get rid of all the other memory cells that they built up.