That's because you have not seen first hand the ravages of disease in a non-vaccinated population. Up until a few years ago, more people worldwide died of infectious disease than from any other cause.
/s = sarcasm tag
If antivirals had seen the same success as antibiotics, this would be a different picture.
And as of yet there still is no common-cold vaccine.
I’ve been to Africa. You can’t compare the condition of a 3rd world village with mud huts, raw sewage in the streets and contaminated water and malnourished kids sleeping on dirt floors to average American suburbia. After the invention of antibiotics, water trap toilets, septic systems and municipal water supplies the measles death rate in this country plummeted. Strangely, the data the CDC (and our ex pediatrician) used for measles deaths was in an african village in west africa.
Wild type measles, in our current social state, scares me a whole lot LESS than a bioengineered measles virus (easy to do with about $10K of supplies and a college lab somewhere) that we’d *all* be susceptible to. And yet, it would be at LEAST six months before there was a vaccine for the ‘new and improved’ measles virus. Countless deaths and disruption from such a scenario. Because we’d rather vaccinate than learn to treat. If most *healthy* kids got measles and we were able to *treat* those who had problems we’d BE healthier and have MORE money to spend on things we can NOT vaccinate out of existence.
Several studies point to a link between a girl having mumps PRIOR to puberty as being PROTECTIVE AGAINST having ovarian cancer later in life. The vaccine? Not so much. What’s wrong with insisting all kids GET the mumps. If they haven’t had it or a positive titer by puberty THEN get the vaccine.
Instead of chasing non pandemic diseases and spending billions of dollars on questionable vaccine mandates (universal hep b for neonates including those not at risk? really? that’s a billion dollars a year set on fire in the back yard! 90% of those kids have completely lost their immunity by puberty. When they DO have a higher risk of contracting hepb) why not spend that money looking for ways to *ameliorate* the bad side effects of viruses that really DO cause problems. And still do.
Like pertussis. Which has mutated from the wild type used in the vaccine to a new kind that has 10 TIMES the mortality and morbidity of the old version. Not happy with just mutating antigenic proteins, it’s also mutating the virulence portion as well.
Oh, did you catch the ‘mutate’ part? You can get a TDaP every single week of your life and STILL not have immunity to the ‘new and improved’ pertussis. Lovely that. Very little testing of all the recent pertussis outbreaks have been genomic in nature. And *most* of the kids have been immunized. Most of those completely.
‘vaccine escape mutants’ is an interesting pubmed search. If you’re a geek.