Research Paper on:
Are Vaccinations Safe?

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
From the time that Edward Jenner introduced the concept of vaccination in the middle of the nineteenth century, people have been reticent about exposing perfectly healthy individuals to deadly disease  (Wolfe and Sharp, 2002). The recent protests over vaccinations are prompted by an increase in immune-related disease, such as diabetes, that has occurred over the last two decades. In  the early 1980s, infants were immunized against a handful of diseases, while today children are typically scheduled to receive 20 immunizations against eleven deadly diseases by the age of two  (Anonymous, 2002). Parents wonder if there is a connection. The medical community readily admits that vaccinations are not always 100 percent effective and that there is a risk involved  with their administration that a negative reaction can result. In truth, there will always be individuals who react adversely from receiving the shots. This occurs often enough that the government  enacted the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in 1987 to protect the companies that make vaccines from liability (Waxman, 2001). In other words, enough children have adverse effects from  receiving the standard vaccinations that the resulting lawsuits threatened the production of vaccine in the US, which caused Congress to step in and offer compensation to these families on the  condition that they do not pursue lawsuits against the companies involved. Considering the sobering fact that a vaccination can cause serious complications in a small child, it might seem logical  for a parent not to have children immunized. However, this position can be proven wrong. First of all, in response to parental concerns, studies have been done to see  if there is a connection between immunizations and diseases such as diabetes. A committee of health and medical researchers examined numerous scientific studies on this question and found that multiple