Starting on Sept. 1 2014, schools and early childhood learning centers in Minnesota will be requiring additional vaccines in the form of immunizations for hepatitis A and B. This is in addition to the current list of vaccines for Polio, chicken pox, DTP, and MMR. Parents are currently allowed to exempt their child from vaccines because of their beliefs, as well as if they have medical issues.

These new vaccines raise the question of whether or not the state should be allowed to require vaccines, and whether parents of healthy children should be able to exempt them because of their beliefs. The only way to keep all children safe is to require vaccines for all those who are medically fit to receive them.

The state of Minnesota currently has laws that require vaccines for children from early learning through high school. Most students are getting the vaccines, but parents are allowed to decline these vaccines. These families that are declining the vaccines for non-medical reasons are putting the rest of the school population, especially children with medical issues, making it unsafe to receive vaccines, at risk.

The concept of community vaccination is that even if a few members of the population get sick, the rest of them will be immunized and the disease will not spread. This keeps the population safe, and helps guard children with weakened immune systems. If parents are declining to get their otherwise healthy children vaccinated, this will harm the rest of the school.

Even though a healthy, non-vaccinated child may not encounter serious issues with some of the diseases vaccinated for, they will have the possibility of spreading it to other children, putting the children with medical issues barring vaccines at a much greater risk.

Some opponents of state-required vaccinations, such as Michelle Bachmann, who stated that these vaccines lead to serious disorders in a presidential debate, believe vaccines to be harmful to healthy children. While this is obviously a very extreme view on immunizations, many parents do believe there are inherent risks of vaccinating healthy children.

While there are some side effects with vaccines, most are very minor, and any serious ones are extremely rare. The risk that healthy children are being put at is just too low to put other children at an increased risk of catching these diseases.

The only way to protect the children with weakened immune systems is with the required vaccination of common diseases. Even though this seems like a breech of a parent’s right to make decisions for their child, the decisions that are made regarding vaccines will not effect only their child, but other children in school as well, especially the ones most at risk.

 The dangers of vaccines are minimal, and they should be required for healthy children in order to protect school populations as a whole and reduce the risk of at risk children catching the diseases that they cannot be immunized for.