But thing is it also is just severe and didn’t become just another cold or just another bacteria.

Some viruses just knock a species out, like this virus which gives Tasmanian Devils a lethal facial cancer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease

There’s a lot of just-so stories about how things are bad till your immune system strengthens upon encountering all the viruses and then everything is ok.

Bollocks. Half of kids used to die before adulthood and it was mostly due to disease.

We associate disease as being mostly mild now because we took decisive action over a couple centuries to reduce, treat or prevent the worst diseases.

We were left with the ones that seem inconsequential, and the flu, which was consequential.

The bet is that Sars-cov-2 is inconsequential because it shares a transmission mechanism with the other inconsequential viruses and because it often feels inconsequential in the acute phase.

Hopefully so, we won’t really know the long term effects for a long time. Post-polio syndrome takes decades to manifest in a patient, as does multiple sclerosis from EBV.

Yes, and this is why the current strain of anti-vaxx sentiment is so dangerous: if enough people buy into that crap then eventually we'll get below the immunity levels required for these diseases to remain suppressed, there is a noticeable uptick in unvaccinated kids since COVID, about -1% for now which is manageable. But if it would get higher it could lead to trouble.

And then there are the vaccinations that have simply been postponed on account of COVID-19:

https://www.who.int/news/item/22-05-2020-at-least-80-million...

Over time this will eventually be caught up.

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.

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.

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

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".

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.

Anyway, I flicked through the paper. It has a habit of making what it thinks are rebuttals but which either are agreeing with what the book says, or rebuts arguments she didn't actually make. If this is the highest quality sort of rebuttal that's out there then I guess I should read the book because it must be pretty solid.

Example 1. Humphries points out that the vaccine rollout was coincident with a change in how polio was classified, which was guaranteed to significantly reduce the rate at which polio was reported regardless of the vaccine because the prior classification criteria had been very loose. The rebuttal is that yes this is true, but there were still a "significant number" of polio cases being reported after the change. This isn't a real disagreement yet the author uses it to claim that Humphries has callous disregard for polio cases, a nasty ad hominem they constantly repeat. It reduces their own credibility as it's so unlikely to be true. She's a medical doctor, not a profession famous for its callous disregard of disease.

Example 2. Humphries points out that "more than half of the cases [in Michigan] were not polio virus related at all" and the rebuttal is that if you restrict to paralytic polio then that statement isn't true any longer, but, again, that wasn't the claim she made.

Example 3. Another non-rebuttal is to point out that the author of one of the studies she cites was a vaccine fan. So? She was citing the data, not the author's general opinions.

Example 4. The overall thrust of the argument here is that Humphries says the threat of polio was exaggerated, and the author admits this was true (redefinitions, FDR etc), but then claims again that anyone who objects is "callous" and it was OK if FDR was "dramatizing" his illness - which maybe wasn't even polio at all - because it spread awareness. Also that it doesn't matter if polio was actually rare because that's also true of childhood cancer and Americans care about that. Again a non-sequitur of a rebuttal that actually supports the points Humphries was making.

What a crap set of counter-arguments. They don't point out any mistakes, it's just a big set of disagreements over emphasis and tone. If anything this seems to reinforce the overall impression formed in the past two years that pro-vaccine people seem systematically unable to accept that tradeoffs exist, accurate data matters and misleading people to win their support is bad. They also radically over-estimate their own rationality.

On top of that, like the other one GP mentioned, one of its main methods of transmission is feces contamination. It's possible hygiene was also a major factor in stopping it.

Fatality rate of 0.2%. Worst fatal complication: Pneumonia, for which the biggest risk factor is immunodeficiency from malnutrition.

> mumps

Fatality rate of 0.04%. Worst fatal complication: Encephalitis, for which the biggest risk factor is immunodeficiency from malnutrition.

> rubella

This one's nasty when it infects a pregnant mother. All women should get rubella vaccinated.

> polio

Fatality rate of up to 30% and debilitating post-effects in up to 50%. You'd be an idiot not to get polio vaccinated.

> diphtheria

Penicillin works.

> Smallpox

Was eliminated with a vaccine that is no longer administered.

You said:

> We associate disease as being mostly mild now because we took decisive action over a couple centuries to reduce, treat or prevent the worst diseases.

My point is that the diseases were bad because there wasn't enough food to maintain healthy immune systems. That's not "decisive action", that's farming and trade. It was the cooking of food and the boiling of water and the washing with soap that prevented deaths from most diseases.

In researching this reply, I've found a respect for some vaccines though. But I still hold food and our natural immunity as the undisputed kings of healthy living.

> Fatality rate of up to 30% and debilitating post-effects in up to 50%.

Only if you developed paralytic polio. Those percents don't apply to the polio virus in general. Only 3% ever developed anything worse than flu-like symptoms, and paralytic polio was something like 10% of that 3%. (I'm going from memory here, these numbers are on the CDC website)

So we're talking an IFR around 0.1%, very close to the estimated flu IFR of 0.07%

We vanquished these diseases in the past 50-100 years mostly. My argument is that diseases did not just all become benign without intervention

Native Americans, to take one example, were incredibly healthy in their traditional lifestyles. This did not give their immune systems sufficient strength to fight off smallpox and other diseases.

Lets be real here. No one hangs out in bat caves for the lulz.