Getting vaccinated should just be considered a human right?

(Unsplash, 2019)

This article was exclusively written for The European Sting by Ms. Maria Clara Labonia, a medical doctor graduated from University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is affiliated to the International Federation of Medical Students Associations (IFMSA), cordial partner of The Sting. The opinions expressed in this piece belong strictly to the writer and do not necessarily reflect IFMSA’s view on the topic, nor The European Sting’s one.

There is a collective trend to get back to the sources. To reach the state in which simple things have a meaning and a conscious sense of wellness for our body, mind and even soul. The aim is to avoid the automatized bad habits that shape our life so transiently in our daily activities, in every act that involves our lifestyle.

Supermarkets are the main place where people go to get their food, and there is a wide variety of shapes and colours that the art of marketing casts to get the consumer´s attention, reaching an instance that the offered product is too far away from bringing the desirable nourishment.

When getting sick, people usually is victim of approved treatments widely prescribed without getting any previous personalized framework. Luckily, we start realizing that it is more convenient to have daily good habits and a good state of mind, rather than depending on big pharma products when our health declines, and that this philosophy can´t coexist with the influence of massive consumption of assets and information that nowadays demand our attention.

There is a critical mass of population that wants to live consciously their individuality, and not as livestock. It is in this way that they avoid consuming things that are broadcasted from “the outside-crowdy world”, because they consider they are not trustworthy, because they don´t understand them or because by any other reason they don´t connect with them.

And so the mind makes its work very quickly, and based on the data that it is receiving it forms the truth about the present memory of experience. In a world full of screamed out loud truths that don´t lead us to our own selves fulfilment, one of the most real and closely personal experiences one can ever have is to take the responsibility for bringing up a child.

As a thoughtful parent one will pretend to provide to the child with the best that is within the grasp. As well as this amnesia regarding to our origins as a civilization that some find the need to evoke, it is also important to get rid of the romanticism. There is another side of the story, which took place up to not much many decades ago, before vaccines were discovered, when it was a reality that people died or got impaired for the rest of their lives because of a disseminated infectious disease.

People´s lives just underwent the chance of nature in these situations which are anymore part of our reality thanks, once more, to science. Science has enlightened humanity with knowledge and freedom since it ever started developing.

It is not a parent´s right to decide if their daughters are vulnerable to get cervical cancer, if their sons become incapable of having kids because of the mumps that they got as teenagers, if their elder parents pass away because of influenza, if their daughters get rubella when pregnant, if they are against vaccination. Getting vaccinated should just be considered a human right.

About the author

Ms. Maria Clara Labonia, a medical doctor graduated from University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is currently pursuing an International master in biomedical sciences in progress, always interested in science and analysis of its interaction at sociocultural levels.