I think its misleading to equate what was available then - both in quality and quantity - with what has been available in the modern world for the last 70 years.

I think it’s misleading to act like vaccines weren’t saving kids’ lives until my parents’ generation.

I think it's fair to say that the uptick in lives that were saved made a huge leap forward with the arrival of industrialized medicine which is to say mass produced vaccines made available to the many and of course the arrival of vaccines for even more diseases that were not previously covered.

I hope we can agree that the recent down tick in the rate of vaccinations is a step backwards.

I’m not sure about that. The death rate from smallpox was unbelievably high before the vaccine, and it was eliminated or nearly so in many countries well before this supposed 1960s date.

Certainly more recent advancements have been wonderful, and the anti-vaux movement is callously throwing away lives and the hard-fought victories of our ancestors.

No.

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_vaccines

This is like saying we've been 'programming' since Ada Lovelace wrote the first program in the 1840, which is silly to say the least. The CDC starts measure after a vaccine has passed the 'licensure' process: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su6004a9.htm

Programming wasn’t saving thousands of lives in the 1840s. Vaccines were is fairly wide use long before the 1960s. Deaths from smallpox dropped sharply though the 1800s and it was eliminated entirely in many countries.

I think you're missing a basic understanding of what an "analogy" is. Hard to keep this conversation going.

Programming had essentially zero real-world impact before the 1950s. The analogy you’re trying to make is that vaccines existed but had virtually no real world impact before the 1960s. Did I get that right? Because that’s what I understood, and it’s severely wrong.