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The World Health Organization lists pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria as the leading causes of child mortality globally. Pneumonia's main risk factor in childre

The World Health Organization lists pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria as the leading causes of child mortality globally. Pneumonia's main risk factor in children is malnutrition. So it's food, not medicine, that's cured the world of child pneumonia. Diarrhea's main risk factor is contamination of food with feces. Again, the food, and its production, storage, and transport sanitary conditions. Washing with soap is the medicine here, not vaccines. Malaria's transmission vector is mosquitos. This one you do need a vaccine for, but these mosquitos only exist on the equator. So while your claim that half of kids used to die mostly due to disease is technically correct, it's actually malnutrition and living in shit that allowed it to happen, and it's our natural immune systems that prevent it (when healthy), not vaccines.

quags 4y ago
Is that listed for today or for the last 100 years? Because it sounds like this excludes things that vaccines may have solved like small pox, polio and other things a basic vaccine schedule has taken care of. Basically if we exclude diseases that vaccines have reduced or eradicated we are not surprisingly left with things that vaccines do not address.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  You are correct, small pox, polio, and rubella are terrifying diseases with vaccines and you should get them. As we are plagued by media panic over every minor flu, it can be difficult to form an accurate picture of what's actually deadly. You should still eat healthy though, your immune system evolved precisely to deal with this problem, and it works very well when fed.
graeme 4y ago
You are using evidence from the present to consider the past. This is not very sensible. There is a long list of diseases we effectively blocked from killing people: * Almost anything bacterial * Measles, mumps, rubella, polio, diphtheria and other commonly immunized childhood diseases * Smallpox, which we eliminated No country has anywhere near a 50% child mortality rate now, even when diarrhea and pneumonia are present. They’re the dregs of the scourge of disease we mostly controlled See here for some descriptions of common childhood diseases of the past: https://www.nature.com/articles/pr200425 https://www.nature.com/articles/pr200425
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  "Smallpox, which we eliminated" But was it by vaccines? The book "Dissolving Illusions" argues it wasn't, and that smallpox vaccination was a failure similar to the one we just witnessed with COVID vaccines (which are unambiguously a failure by the criteria on which they were originally presented to the populace). It builds the case by citing many historical texts and news reports from the time when Jenner had first developed his vaccine, showing how it was at first advertised by him as granting 100% immunity only for many cases to emerge where the vaccine failed or outright gave people full smallpox infections. It also shows how the authorities went into denial and became utterly totalitarian, forcing vaccine mandates on people, refusing to accept that Jenner's invention wasn't perfect and forcing children to take it against the will of the parents, some of whom went to prison rather than allow their child to be vaccinated. It concludes by arguing that smallpox was actually wiped out in the west (along with many other illnesses) by the general improvements in health and sanitation in the 20th century, rather than a vaccine that was very far from being 100% effective. There was a time when I would have ignored this sort of alternate history take on medical consensus. But having just lived through an event exactly like the one the book describes it all sounds extremely plausible. COVID vaccines went from 95% effective and so clearly able to stop transmission that it was ethical to force people to take it, to "it doesn't stop infection or transmission or sickness, but it does reduce severe disease, let's hope that's not because it's inducing tolerance to spike protein in which case it'll actually be creating more serious disease without that being correctly attributed to the shots".
  - jemmyw 4y ago
    https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/wrong-about-polio-a-review-of-suzanne-humphries-md-and-roman-bystrianyks-dissolving-illusions-part-1-the-long-version/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/wrong-about-polio-a-review-... Lots of tables of figures if you'd like to peruse them, although its more concentrating on Polio. Anyway I guess the point is, yes there is an alternative take, but just because you read that in a book doesn't mean you should believe what you read. A significant amount more research would need to be done and um the author makes enough mistakes to take this with something of a grain of salt.

quags 4y ago

Is that listed for today or for the last 100 years? Because it sounds like this excludes things that vaccines may have solved like small pox, polio and other things a basic vaccine schedule has taken care of. Basically if we exclude diseases that vaccines have reduced or eradicated we are not surprisingly left with things that vaccines do not address.

hypertele-Xii 4y ago
You are correct, small pox, polio, and rubella are terrifying diseases with vaccines and you should get them. As we are plagued by media panic over every minor flu, it can be difficult to form an accurate picture of what's actually deadly. You should still eat healthy though, your immune system evolved precisely to deal with this problem, and it works very well when fed.

graeme 4y ago

You are using evidence from the present to consider the past. This is not very sensible. There is a long list of diseases we effectively blocked from killing people: * Almost anything bacterial * Measles, mumps, rubella, polio, diphtheria and other commonly immunized childhood diseases * Smallpox, which we eliminated No country has anywhere near a 50% child mortality rate now, even when diarrhea and pneumonia are present. They’re the dregs of the scourge of disease we mostly controlled See here for some descriptions of common childhood diseases of the past: https://www.nature.com/articles/pr200425 https://www.nature.com/articles/pr200425

fidgewidge 4y ago
"Smallpox, which we eliminated" But was it by vaccines? The book "Dissolving Illusions" argues it wasn't, and that smallpox vaccination was a failure similar to the one we just witnessed with COVID vaccines (which are unambiguously a failure by the criteria on which they were originally presented to the populace). It builds the case by citing many historical texts and news reports from the time when Jenner had first developed his vaccine, showing how it was at first advertised by him as granting 100% immunity only for many cases to emerge where the vaccine failed or outright gave people full smallpox infections. It also shows how the authorities went into denial and became utterly totalitarian, forcing vaccine mandates on people, refusing to accept that Jenner's invention wasn't perfect and forcing children to take it against the will of the parents, some of whom went to prison rather than allow their child to be vaccinated. It concludes by arguing that smallpox was actually wiped out in the west (along with many other illnesses) by the general improvements in health and sanitation in the 20th century, rather than a vaccine that was very far from being 100% effective. There was a time when I would have ignored this sort of alternate history take on medical consensus. But having just lived through an event exactly like the one the book describes it all sounds extremely plausible. COVID vaccines went from 95% effective and so clearly able to stop transmission that it was ethical to force people to take it, to "it doesn't stop infection or transmission or sickness, but it does reduce severe disease, let's hope that's not because it's inducing tolerance to spike protein in which case it'll actually be creating more serious disease without that being correctly attributed to the shots".
- jemmyw 4y ago
  https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/wrong-about-polio-a-review-of-suzanne-humphries-md-and-roman-bystrianyks-dissolving-illusions-part-1-the-long-version/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/wrong-about-polio-a-review-... Lots of tables of figures if you'd like to peruse them, although its more concentrating on Polio. Anyway I guess the point is, yes there is an alternative take, but just because you read that in a book doesn't mean you should believe what you read. A significant amount more research would need to be done and um the author makes enough mistakes to take this with something of a grain of salt.