Why should we consider it? Billions of people have been vaccinated without a vaccine-caused epidemic.

We do however have a virus-caused epidemic, currently.

It's just stark the difference between adults back then and the overly coddled people passing for adults today.

What are we supposed to learn from that example? Companies developed safer techniques, government testing plans improved, it sounds like the system was improved in response to the kind of thing which happens with new technology.

More importantly, however, it happened in an era where everyone agreed that polio was worth avoiding. The modern antivax movement was founded on Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent attempts to cash in on test kits and lawsuits brought against vaccine manufacturers but it also critically depended on people who had grown up in a world of ubiquitous vaccination and preventative medicine, where vague claims sounded dire because the imagined baseline was “life is basically okay” rather than “I know multiple kids who died or were scarred for life” as their parents had known. Finally, there wasn’t a major political movement putting a billion-dollar propaganda machine to work spreading false claims and downplaying the real impact of a disease.

And yet numbers were still 90%+, so what does that say about their views on vaccine usefulness?

Or does it just tell the story of a time without easily accessible open media?

Fair, although I could look at that open media as propaganda/brainwashing and reach a conclusion on media's effectiveness.

I can also look at the past and ask if vaccines eradicated the diseases it was meant for... and for that it was incredibly effective.

But is that even true? Have you seen this graphic for example https://postimg.cc/CBJQF4dZ

Edit:// I don't know how truthful it is. But vaccines seem not always the resolving factor. Source of the image: https://learntherisk.org/vaccines/diseases/

objectively, polio was eradicated via vaccine.

objectively, US had a fighting chance in its independence war due to George Washington's forced immunization of armies.

What you are sharing is proof that propaganda works. You are sharing non-scholarly articles from untrustworthy websites..

It's absurd because anyone can set up a website at anytime with charts/data saying anything we might want and reach any conclusion we want.

This is what you are sharing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_The_Risk but I guess you did not do your own research on what you are consuming... Their arguments are disputed in the wikipedia links if you want to inform yourself.

> Arguments against vaccination are contradicted by overwhelming scientific consensus about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.[7][8][9][10]

It's also a non profit set up by an antivaxer that has no research/investigative capabilities, all they do is gather donations and spread fake data to gather more donations.

It says they had their trust badly abused by the sort of people who push for universal vaccination, and learned from it.