"Go to an old cemetery. See all the baby graves from before the 1950s & 60s? After that, hardly any. That's when people started vaccinating their children against deadly childhood diseases. If you're unsure what to do to protect your kids, the answer is literally written in stone." — Michael Okuda
Without vaccines, many transmissible diseases were once an early death sentence. People are so quick to forget how fortunate we are to have access to them.
@luckytran And the names of babies on the marked graves are few compared with all the babies in the register books (if the cemetery has managed to keep theirs). This newspaper clipping is the story behind a headstone in a cemetery near me.
Here's a web page showing the impact of vaccines over the course of the 20th century in the U.S. states to dramatically reduce the number of cases of various diseases: measles, hepatitis A, mumps, whooping cough, polio, rubella, smallpox.
@luckytran as a survivor of a few childhood illnesses (whooping cough, etc.) I am a proponent of vaccines. No child should endure the illness; no parent should endure the worry/loss.
@luckytran Girls & women received informal training in practical nursing. My Mom in the 1950s was kind of cold & indifferent but if one of us kids got sick we had her attention. Vitals monitored, fluids pushed, favorite foods offered, a bell to ring if we needed her.
I don’t know how working parents today would be able to care for a child with mumps, measles, chickenpox, whooping cough, or diphtheria
@luckytran
Diphtheria was a killer before that vax, which started being used around 1900. It was so contagious that they'd bury the victims the same day.
@luckytran Absolutely. I maintain an old #cemetery and this monument in particular always gets me. 6 children, most of their ages measured in months. And just across from here we have 9 tiny tablet monuments for 9 children killed by the Spanish flu epidemic.
@luckytran One of the reasons people had so many children. So many died in infancy.
As soon as vaccines were available for polio, measles, diphtheria, and whooping cough, my Mum was there to get us our needles. She'd seen what damage they could do.
@luckytran I'm starting to feel sorry for the anti-vaxxer lemmings folowing some charlatan right over the cliff of infection.
Maybe it's time the most vulnerable and immune compromised sue these purveyors of disinformation for malicious neglect causing bodily harm for their refusal to protect others from their rampant studpidity
@luckytran
I spend more time in old graveyards than I care to admit while making history videos, and I can definitely confirm that old gravestones have a lot of dead children under them 😞
@luckytran Better nutrition, improved living conditions also helped along with advances in Medicine, including care of expectant mothers. Vaccines are important but they’re not the only factor.
@luckytran During the influenza epidemic (before any vaccines), newspapers reminded people not just to wash their hands and wear masks, but to only take advice from real doctors.
@luckytran
Started with smallpox vaccination in about 1850s.
Antibiotics from about 1910.
But Penicillin was only widely available from 1945 after WWII.
Polio vaccine 1950 a major breakthrough.
So, yes, vaccines save millions of lives more than small % of reaction. So do antibiotics.
But Michael Okuda's claim on graveyards is inaccurate.
It was Pasteurisation of milk, sanitation & other environmental factors that reduced infant mortality in the USA 1900s to 1950s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality#History
@luckytran Is there a chance any of those improvements are due to better sanitation and/or other factors? I don’t doubt that rubbing diseased cow parts on my body to acquire immunity can work, but when you list only one underlying cause I can’t help but doubt your position a little.
@luckytran I'm old enough to have had relatives living with post-polio syndrome, and stories of an aunt who died of an infection in her teens and another aunt that died of childbirth fever.