Is this our only choices? Read on to see..
Vaccines: claiming credit when none was due
“The Role of Public Health Improvements in Health Advances: The 20th Century United States”
The above paper was written by the economist David Cutler of Harvard University and research associate Grant Miller of Stanford University. They’re not ‘anti-vaxxers’ – they’re just two men looking at the effects of clean water and effective sewage systems in American cities, introduced between 1900 and 1936. You’ll see from the following graph that major infectious diseases dropped away long before vaccines were introduced, and long before vaccines took the credit for halting epidemics. The numbers relate to shares of total mortality (viz., the percentage of overall deaths from all causes.) I’ve added the right-hand column to detail when available vaccines were first introduced.
Cause of death | 1900 | 1936 | Vaccines |
Major infectious disease | 39.3 | 17.9 | Too broad for vaccines |
Tuberculosis | 11.1 | 5.3 | Mass vaccination
after WWII (post 1945) |
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