They don’t mention those items because they are already well documented in many other publications, and discussing the health risks of non-vaccination is not the focus of this paper.
Infectious diseases are still a major cause of death in the world. Until about a decade ago, infectious diseases were responsible for half of all deaths.
The anti-vax movement gains traction because today’s young parents do not remember a time in this country when most children died before the age of five. It is unlikely they have ever known of a child who died of a vaccine preventable disease. On top of that, they are almost certainly scientifically illiterate, and thus have no clue how the immune system functions or how vaccines train the immune system. So they fall for the scams of people who are trying to bring back high child death rates because they are convinced that the only way to fight human overpopulation is by bringing back deadly disease.
The fallacy of the attitude that parents should be able to decide whether to protect their children from deadly disease is that they are not just deciding to endanger their own children. They are risking the lives of other people’s children through their selfish and irresponsible decisions. Parents have lost newborn babies to pertussis because antivaxxers who carried the disease gave it to the babies.
I have nothing but contempt for scammers who try to stop parents from protecting their children.
Infectious diseases are still a major cause of death in the world.
And in the US they are acquired 2 ways overwhelmingly
#1. Hospitals and healthcare facilities.
#2. Drugs and promiscuous sex.
In the civilized world, the rate of serious infectious disease outside #1 and #2 is extremely low.