Let's Look at Deaths in the Pre-Vaccine Era
You might be surprised to learn how many people used to die with measles, pertussis, diphtheria, and other now vaccine-preventable diseases.
People often get confused about the number of deaths from now vaccine preventable deaths in the pre-vaccine era because they see those mortality or death charts showing big drops in the early 20th century.
Anti-vaccine influencers use those charts to make you think that vaccines didn’t have a big impact on saving lives in the pre-vaccine era.
Let’s Look at Deaths in the Pre-Vaccine Era
Now, there is no denying that improved sanitation, hygiene, nutrition, and medical care had a very big impact on deaths in the very early part of the 20th century.
And while many vaccines were introduced at this time, except for the smallpox vaccine, they weren’t yet in wide use.
So there is also no denying that the impact of improved sanitation, hygiene, nutrition, and medical care stalled by the 1930-40s…
Which is why in 1950, there were still thousands of deaths from diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, measles, and mumps, etc. And even more survived with long term complications.
Deaths and disease that finally dropped even more once we got a vaccine to prevent each disease!
Still not a believer?
Well, if sanitation and clean water systems were the only things that prevented all of those deaths, then why did it prevent most of the diphtheria, pertussis, and measles deaths in the 1900s, the polio deaths in the 1950s, the Hib deaths in the 1990s, and then wait to prevent the pneumococcal deaths until 2001?!?
That makes no sense, does it?
What does make sense is that vaccines work!
And it makes even more sense that if we stop getting vaccinated, then these diseases will come roaring back, and there will even more deaths and disease (remember, there are many more people now…).
Antivaxers deliberately conflate mortality and morbidity.
They cite mortality data, implying vaccines aren’t important because, as you point out, improved medical care and nutrition were major players in reducing mortality.
But if the diseases themselves don’t go away they still cause considerable morbidity and a degree of mortality remains inevitable.
Improved public health, sanitation and hygiene will impact primarily on feco-oral disease transmission, but nothing will stop kids being kids and their liberal dissemination of bodily fluids to their infant playmates, and nothing will stop transmission of disease spread by the respiratory route.
Which is exactly why diseases like measles, pertussis, mumps, rubella, HiB, chickenpox, pneumococcus, meningitis, influenza, diphtheria remained frequent (or even universal) in children in the prevax era.
It took vaccines to eliminate or reduce these, and if you don’t get the disease, you can’t die from it. If you are vaccinated but still get the disease despite that, then you are also much less likely to get severely affected or to die, compared to if you were never vaccinated.
Antivaxers will never tell you this, although they know it. They refuse to acknowledge the truth. They tell people not to vaccinate, saying it is harmful and that it won’t help you. They are lying.