Section 2: Overview
Vaccination: Public Mandates and Citizen Objections
We will continue to deepen our knowledge about ethics, public health, and vaccines by examining the key issues, perspectives, and arguments surrounding the development and mandating of vaccinations to prevent widespread infectious diseases. We will use the Framing Questions below and read a variety of texts that respond to these questions, carefully analyzing how authors go about structuring their arguments.
Why have some parents been concerned about giving their children vaccinations?
What are the ethical issues involved in not vaccinating children?
What are the ethical issues involved in mandating vaccinations?
In addition to deepening our background knowledge of these issues, we will learn about the concept of an argumentative position and how to delineate and evaluate arguments in the areas of public health mandates, vaccinations, and parental objections.
Lesson 1:
We will watch a section of a 2015 PBS Frontline video, “The Vaccine War,” paying close attention to the arguments both for and against vaccinations. We will analyze and discuss the video. Then, we will reflect on the video and our notes, evaluating which arguments were solid and which need further explanation.
Lesson 2:
We will read and analyze an article from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that outlines what would happen if we stopped giving vaccinations. The text presents a first opportunity to delineate an argument for its perspective, purpose, position, reasoning, claims, and use of evidence, as we move toward writing our own arguments later in the unit.
Lesson 3:
We will read two articles that provide explanations for the first Framing Question: Why have some parents been concerned about giving their children vaccinations? The first, a 2012 article from JAMA, addresses the history of resistance to mandatory vaccinations; the second, from The New York Times, examines more recent challenges to new state mandates. We will be introduced to a tool that will help us evaluate ideas as they are presented in a text; we will analyze how ideas and supporting details represent perspectives on an issue, such as vaccination, and how perspectives influence the positions taken by parents, scientists, and government officials.
Lesson 4:
We will learn about the importance of paying attention to authors’ use of language and will begin compiling powerful and interesting sentences in our Mentor Sentence Journals.
Lesson 5:
We will begin to address the second Framing Question: What are the ethical issues involved in not vaccinating children? We will read an opinion essay from Scientific American that provides an ethical perspective on the decision to opt out of vaccinations and a letter from the children’s book author Roald Dahl that uses personal experience to speak about the dangers of not vaccinating. We will delineate and analyze the two pro-vaccination arguments, evaluate claims made by the authors, discuss the ethical issues and approaches, and continue to think about the impacts of vaccinating or not vaccinating.
Lesson 6:
We will continue to address the ethical issues surrounding vaccination by considering the third Framing Question: What are the ethical issues involved in mandating vaccinations? We will read, analyze, and evaluate two arguments that view mandatory vaccinations from a personal liberty perspective. We will delineate and analyze the two anti-vaccination arguments, evaluate claims made by the authors, discuss the ethical issues and approaches, and continue to think about the impacts of decisions to mandate or not mandate vaccinations.
Lesson 7:
We will continue to address the ethical issues surrounding vaccination by reviewing and discussing the positions taken in the four pro- and anti-vaccination arguments we have read and delineated. We will learn how to move from delineating to evaluating an argument, and will evaluate one of the four texts individually. From this base, we will begin to identify our own perspectives and positions, and practice arguing for those positions in a speed debate.
Lesson 8:
We will evaluate two arguments that address mandatory vaccinations from two very different perspectives, one from 2015 that advocates for universal vaccination and one from 2019 that suggests we should mandate vaccinations with care. We will begin to think and write about our own perspectives based on the ideas introduced in this section, as well as previous texts in the unit that address this topic.
Lesson 9:
We will continue to practice delineating and evaluating arguments about mandating vaccinations, using two opposing arguments from a medical journal. We will highlight the perspective, claims, and evidence found in each of the arguments and in a rebuttal to the second one, in preparation for comparing how the two sets of authors have built these academic arguments from claims and counterclaims.
Lesson 10:
In preparation for the Section Diagnostic, we will identify ethical issues and questions raised by the mandating of vaccinations. We will learn more about how California has worked to restrict exemptions for vaccinations by reading the article “California Law to Restrict Medical Vaccine Exemptions Raises Questions Over Control.” We will use evidence from the text read to analyze the arguments and discuss if California should be a model for the rest of the country when the question of mandating vaccinations and limiting exemptions arises.
Lesson 11:
We will respond to the task questions by writing a multiparagraph response that explains our overviews of the particular ethical issues or questions we have identified, reviews various societal perspectives on the issue, and supports an evidence-based claim about how one or more ethical approaches might be applied to respond to the issue.
Lesson 12:
We will review feedback on the Section Diagnostic. We will use the feedback to make revisions to our work.
Lesson 13:
We will share the understanding we have gained through our independent reading and continue reading our texts.