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cc this feels like it's up your alley
huge pain in the butt to hand-copy all these historic vital stats, but I did it a few years back and have never regretted it!
For example, here's typhoid. Vaccine available 1896. You could try to say there was a pre-vaccine decline, but it's hard to know for sure. Certainly absolutely no shot of falling to <500/yr pre-vaccine.
Here's scarlet fever deaths. Vaccine invented 1924, widespread availability by the early 1930s.
Scarlet fever pretty much only kills kids, so the figure falls over time partly because because Massachusetts births were falling. But you can see deaths drop to ~zero after vaccine.
I could go on.
Vaccines obviously aren't the only factor improving health. Sanitation efforts and improved treatments had big effects too. But you don't go from vaccinatable deaths at 70% to 3% without vaccines mattering!
Okay, one more.
TB deaths were already declining when the vaccine was rolled out. And they didn't drop to super-low levels until antibiotics. But it's obvious vaccination helped a ton!
Measles is an interesting one.
Vaccine isn't available until 1963. Measles is viral, so antibiotics 1930 and later aren't a plausible explanation either.
But we can see that there's no chance of "staying at zero" without a vaccine.
I don't think vaccines are the entire cause of falling death rates from conditions for which we have vaccines.
But they're obviously part of it!
Influenza is a weird one. First, the data starts in 1890 because it wasn't widely recognized as a discrete disease in MA's classification system before then. Second, there's the huge pandemic bump. I'm gonna ignore that. Third, vaccine development was a slow roll 1931-1950.
But by 1950-55 at the latest, influenza vaccination was relatively common if far from universal.
Again, I'm not saying vaccines caused 100% of improvements. But they're part of the story!
When you're moving fast you make mistakes. Here are some of mine:
1) First graph has an error. I double-counted tuberculosis deaths in many early years. Fixed. Trends are identical, but 1842-1877 average is now 50%, not 70%. Note that the actual graph of tuberculosis deaths IS
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As an aside, this isn't my data, it's from , but I've added the labels for smallpox variolation and vaccination.
The other diseases all reflect vaccines developed during the period of modern improvements in sanitation and health.
Smallpox was much earlier:
How here's the same graph, but with Massachusetts smallpox data added in.
Massachusetts was an early adopter of variolation AND of vaccination for smallpox. Even so, in both series you can see the improvement in the post-1880s vaccine in both time series!
Here's whooping cough deaths in Massachusetts.
As an aside, whooping cough cases are once again on the rise, largely due to unvaccinated kids.
Cholera is an interesting case. Several cholera vaccines were developed 1870-1900. None got widespread usage. I'm actually not sure if cholera vaccination ever became common in America.
Moreover, cholera mostly kills children, with similar symptoms as other diseases.
As a result 1) it's hard to know how reliable old stats are, 2) it's not clear how many people ever even got vaccinated in Massachusetts.
Anyways, here's all deaths of all cholera-or-maybe-like-cholera.
In this case it's pretty clear the existence of the cholera vaccine was irrelevant. Basically nobody used it in MA, and the real solution was water treatment and sewage infrastructure.
Now overlay autism rates against the number of vaccines given.
Also your chart doesn't take into account other advances like hospitals, antibiotics, diagnosis and surgery imprivement, anesthesia, sanitation and hygiene, neonatal care, nutrition etc.
Its not ALL vaccines. C'mon.
Basically all of these charts show clear evidence of confounding factors like better sanitation, medical practices etc.
One thing that stands out is that the return on vaccines post 1950 is pretty much zero.
This chart does not show what you think it does.
AT ALL.
There is no noticeable change from the 1950’s to today.
In fact it looks like the percentage may have slightly increased from 1950 to today.
So why has the number of mandated vaccines given to children increased 7x
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This analysis doesn't control for confounding variables like electrification, sanitation, public water systems, hand washing. So it doesn't support your claim.
Water and sewage treatment was of course the other big cause, and arguably the bigger one. This study by Cutler and Grant found that clean water was the cause of roughly half of mortality reduction in cities.
There used to be an awful lot of deaths from cholera..this problem was of course resolved by the chorination of water. Given other cause of death not addressed by vaccines...heart attacks, accidents, homicides, etc...it's hard to see how the share addressed by vaccines could be
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why did this change so much before 1900? feels like a lot of the relevant vaccines wouldn't have been developed by then
What does malaria look like? There are now malaria vaccines, but most of the decline in that disease was driven by insecticides and other anti-mosquito operations.
I'm also curious about cholera--probably an increase as more people began to live in cities and then a decline
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Maybe it isn’t exactly the vaccines (a method of delivery) but the timing, the mixing and the justifications used which turn out to often be untrue. You can’t equate a smallpox vaccine with a Covid vax!
It's important to remind people of the benefits! I remember kids with Polio, no fun!
I think vaccines in most cases do lead to a drop in the disease they target. The question becomes are their downstream negative effects like increases in other diseases such as autism, immunological diseases, cancers, etc. I think we should look at long term data between vaxxed
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Now, not all « vaccines » are created equal, what’s being sold today has little to do with the OG vaccines that built trust and saved lives, that’s like comparing a fast-food burger to a home-cooked meal, rushed and profit-driven versus crafted with care and integrity. Now,
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Thank you! COVID distorted this, but hopefully the message is loud and clear, “NO MORE FALSE INFORMATION!” We are watching you now!
Improvements in sanitation and hospital protocols probably helped a great deal too.
I get it, and I think most people gets it.
People question two things:
1) concomitant with the vaccination, hygiene and medicine were progressing. How much was cause X co-incidence.
2) what side effects (other diseases for instance) could have been caused by vaccination?
on 1), see below
on 2) , there's pretty much no evidence of any meaningful mortality burden at the societal level from mutated bacteria or viruses due to vaccination. some individual cases but a rounding error at the societal scale.
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Lyman Stone 石來民 
@lymanstoneky
two facts:
1) in lab-type settings antibiotics, vaccines, nutrition, and sanitation interventions all have huge effects on health outcomes
2) in historic time series, none of them has a consistent ability to explain the changes they should be able to explain
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This would be interesting to anybody that is anti-all-vaxs. But it’s useless to anybody that might have concerns over some of the vaccines. And might, you know, want some safety/testing studies done.
Not vaccines alone. Hygiene also played a huge roll. Unfortunately with vaccines there has not been enough questions and that is what people are now doing especially with the new generation mRNA. Vaccines are good for most of the people but you cannot say they are 100% safe for
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Do you think that if the population is growing increasingly skeptical of vaccines, it’s good policy to conduct modern large scale studies to possibly reconsider some aspects of the vaccine schedule? Or better to just say “fuck you idiots?”
After these inprovements, death rates were on the way down for every disease before vaccinations were introduced.
Widespread antibiotic use: late 1940-1960
Widespread use of enriched flour products: 1941 - chronic malnutrition was in play before they realized processing was
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So the huge increase in vaccines in the childhood vaccination schedule starting in the 1980's failed to reduce deaths?
Got it.
For those attempting to argue that there were falls in the death rate even before the era of mass vaccination 2 things should be remembered:
Improvements in hygeine, quarantine, nutrition all had big payoffs. Vaccines are not instead of but a complement to these.
Really big
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How could we disentangle the effects of sanitation from that of vaccines?
I know many anti vaxxers say this, but it's a handwaving argument, not rigorous. Do you know of any nation which is first world with regards to sanitation, but does not vaccinate, vaccinates much less, or
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Coerced Covid vaccination and shutdowns damaged trust in vaccines, leading to hesitancy and lower vaccination rates. Political polarization fueled by mandates and restrictions further eroded public health efforts, possibly delaying economic recovery and exacerbating
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So… not much improvement since 1950 or so. Prolly time to re-examine the newer vaccines.
What I see on n all these charts is a sharp decline in disease that simply continues after vaccines are implemented.
And 75 years ago they hit the lowest point ever on this chart. In the past 75 years how many "vaccines" besides the polio vaccine have been added as mandatory for school children?
Even then the first doses of the COVID injectables may have helped against the first variant of the virus. However subsequent shots were lucky to be no worse than useless as the virus changed & many times they were not eg:- 3rd dose -700% at preventing serious illness in Israel.
Yes, they are lifesavers. But those vaccines are not MRNA based,
&the lies about & expulsion of those who dared to question anything about COVID vaccines, as well as findings that those who promoted them in the CDC, etc, were benefiting financially from such support from the
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So according to this plot, all of the vaccines introduced after 1950 had negligible effect.
Life ending Nuclear war would eradicate cancer… Not saying your stats are wrong, but they are obviously incomplete.
Only the real vaccines which aren't more dangerous than the disease they are supposed to protect against were of benefit. The mRNA injectables against COVID demonstrably were dangerous to too many. Let's see the trial results, then we can judge properly.
On the other hand…vaccines are also reducing the Darwinian benefits to mankind of evolutionary change to survive these illnesses as a species.
If you’re going to confuse correlation with causation, at least find correlation.
Not that I disagree with the conclusion but this isn’t the best way to measure. If you increase the rate of murders or other ways of dying then the number of deaths caused by preventable diseases also goes down.
You need a share of deaths caused by vaccines (an accurate one) on the same chart to have something useful.
Now. Post the death rates since pasteurization. Allergy rates. Autism rates. High Fructose Corn Syrup. Glysophate. Fluoride. Say staring around 1940.
We traded one for the other. One was natural. One is greed. Greed will eventually destroy the world.
We are idiots.
I’m not sure that this makes a pro-vaccine case quite as robustly as one might reckon, tho; that vaccines mean we have more Bostonians that otherwise we would seems like a pretty clear, and probably dispositive, mark against them, indeed.
As a genealogist, I spend a lot of time in MA death records. I wouldn't have been able to give exact figures, but, yes, most if the causes I see are from now-preventable diseases. It's something that's struck me over and over. And it's true into the early 20th century too.
. I was surprised to read about New England in the colonial period, in that it was not a healthy place. Apparently lots of TB and other diseases were circulating. Captain Parker, one of the heroes at Lexington in April, 1775, was dead a few months later from TB at age 46
Obviously invention of antibiotics and improved medical care were also a big factor, but I can’t wrap my head around vaccines deniers.
That huge decline from 1880 to 1918 is wild. That's long after the smallpox vaccine became widely available, and well before we got modern vaccines, so what's driving it?
My recollection is that the SCOTUS case on vaccine mandates arose in Massachusetts.
Massachusetts was an early adopter of using chlorine at the source of water distribution.
Investigate that...might find it interesting.
that seems to correlate with homes having electricity and indoor plumbing and no famine
When were the relevant vaccines rolled out?
There could be multiple factors that led to the reduction of particular diseases becoming widespread deadly issues
But yeah, infection used to be a top-tier cause of death category, with TB being a big part of that
It would be more helpful if we had individual diseases charted, that way we could compare individual diseases to vaccine rollout.
Clean water. The world is not one dimensional.
Now graph autism against after immunity was granted to the pharmaceutical industry.
Your charts seem to show that the effect of vaccines was rather limited pre-1950. And certainly there is little evidence for any benefit of the much increased number of vaccines post-1950.
Ah yes the only thing that happened between 1840 and 1950 was that we got vaccines. Everything else? The same as it's always been.
Most people who express skepticism about vaccines are concerned about the excipients and additives in modern vaccines. Certainly in my circle of moms, the concerns are about things like aluminum, formaldehyde, aborted fetal tissue, canine kidney/other animal cells being injected.
the earth is overpopulated and the gene pool is degenerate
There was a pre vaccine decline in nearly every major disease of the time. People back then didn't even know ow what a germ was. No one washed their hands, they drank water that people shit in upstream. Industrialization, long hours, rancid food, immune systems had no chance.
Wow, that's a fascinating stat! As someone who's always interested in how tech can improve our daily lives, I have to wonder: how can we leverage data like this to inform smart health solutions? Maybe AI-powered disease tracking or personalized vaccine reminders? The
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Plp don't understand how much vaccination helped w/disease. My grandmother had to live w/the death of one daughter dying from measles while another survived (simultaneous illness). No diff in care yet lived w/guilt. A picture was all that was left.
How can I not follow you after this terrific documentation? Following you for sure!!
Now do what years water treatment, sewage management, antibiotics, electricity, and sanitation happened
I predict polio will resurface, perhaps in unvaccinated communities like the Amish, but then spreading outside. Unvaccinated children will be at risk. This sort of event is totally preventable.
Great. But can we normalize for improved sanitation and increased caloric intake over the same period? Not saying you’re wrong, but there are other factors that changed rapidly over this period.
That is when we in science say “correlation does not imply causation”