The best way to fight misinformation is with good information.
Life Before Vaccines: A Portrait of Vulnerability
What happened before vaccines, people died. Childhood was a perilous gamble against invisible enemies. Smallpox claimed three hundred million lives in the twentieth century alone, with ninety percent of deaths striking children under ten. Measles ravaged communities every few years, killing 2.6 million annually worldwide. In America, whooping cough felled nine thousand children yearly before the 1940s, while diphtheria suffocated young victims with mortality rates reaching 12%. Polio paralyzed sixteen thousand Americans annually. Families lived in perpetual dread, watching helplessly as diseases swept through neighborhoods, leaving behind grieving parents and empty cradles—until vaccines became commonplace. Our failure to understand science and history has allowed once-controlled diseases that had been eradicated in some parts of the world to resurface in numbers steadily.
A range of sources from journals to web resources to more accessible histories. The key to counter misinformation is with good information:
1 Smallpox – Statistics & Facts | Statista https://www.statista.com/topics/6214/smallpox/
2 Measles – World Health Organization (WHO) https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/measles
3 Historical Comparisons of Morbidity and Mortality for Vaccine … https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/209448
4 Whooping Cough (Pertussis) – NFID https://www.nfid.org/infectious-disease/whooping-cough/
5 Global Childhood Deaths From Pertussis: A Historical Review – PMC https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5106618/
6 History of polio vaccination – World Health Organization (WHO) https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/history-of-vaccination/history-of-polio-vaccination
7 smallpox deaths by age group in the Great Pandemic 1870-1875 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107867/smallpox-share-smallpox-total-deaths-by-age-great-pandemic-historical/
8 Measles vaccination: Know the facts – IDSA https://www.idsociety.org/ID-topics/infectious-disease/measles/know-the-facts
9 Diphtheria – PMC https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2794815/
10 An evaluation of pertussis vaccine – PubMed https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/399385/
11 Deaths due to whooping cough U.S. 1990-2019 – Statista https://www.statista.com/statistics/1122996/us-pertussis-deaths-number/
12 Vaccine-associated Paralytic Polio – CDC https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/vaccine-associated-paralytic-polio-faq.html
13 History of smallpox vaccination – World Health Organization (WHO) https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/history-of-vaccination/history-of-smallpox-vaccination
14 Pertussis in the preantibiotic and prevaccine era, with emphasis on … https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10447027/
15 ‘Unqualified failure’ in polio vaccine policy left thousands of kids … https://www.science.org/content/article/unqualified-failure-polio-vaccine-policy-left-thousands-kids-paralyzed
16 History of smallpox: Outbreaks and vaccine timeline – Mayo Clinic https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/history-disease-outbreaks-vaccine-timeline/smallpox
17 Pertussis Surveillance and Trends | Whooping Cough – CDC https://www.cdc.gov/pertussis/php/surveillance/index.html
18 History of polio: Outbreaks and vaccine timeline – Mayo Clinic https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/history-disease-outbreaks-vaccine-timeline/polio
19 U.S. records most whooping cough deaths since 2017 – CBS News https://www.cbsnews.com/news/whooping-cough-deaths-us-most-since-2017/
20 Pertussis (Whooping Cough) – Vaccine Knowledge Project https://vaccineknowledge.ox.ac.uk/pertussis-whooping-cough
21 SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND ON SMALLPOX AND … – NCBI https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK221063/
22 Smallpox – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox
23 Chapter 16: Pertussis | Pink Book – CDC https://www.cdc.gov/pinkbook/hcp/table-of-contents/chapter-16-pertussis.html
24 Pertussis (Whooping Cough) | History of Vaccines https://historyofvaccines.org/diseases/pertussis-whooping-cough/
25 The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to a … https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1383764/
26 Achievements in Public Health, 1900-1999 Impact of Vaccines … https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00056803.htm
27 The Effect of Oral Polio Vaccine at Birth on Infant Mortality https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4614411/
28 Polio vaccine – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine
29 The history of Polio – from eradication to re-emergence – PAHO/WHO https://www.paho.org/en/stories/history-polio-eradication-re-emergence
30 Polio | History of Vaccines – HistoryOfVaccines.org https://historyofvaccines.org/history/polio/timeline/
More reading in accessible history works on Vaccines:
Kinch, Michael. Between Hope and Fear. New York: Pegasus Books, 2019.
Offit, Paul. Vaccinated: From Cowpox to mRNA, the Remarkable Story of Vaccines. New York: Harper Perennial, 2022.
Oshinsky, David M. Polio: An American Story. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2005.
Smith, Jane S. Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine. New York: William Morrow & Co, 1990.
Waller, John. The Discovery of the Germ: Twenty Years That Transformed the Way We Think About Disease. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Zimmer, Carl. A Planet of Viruses: Third Edition. Chicago London: University of Chicago Press, 2021.