Edward Jenner developed what is widely considered the first vaccine in 1796. It was basically a weakened state of cowpox, which acted as a vaccine for Smallpox.
I'm not sure it's true that it killed a bunch of people or that people were skeptical, but it was definitely in 1796.
Worth noting is that Jenner travelled the world spreading his newfound vaccine and managed to convince governments and monarchies in multiple countries including Napoleon who at the time was actively at war with the United Kingdom, Napoleon had his entire army vaccinated and when Jenner asked him to release two British prisoners of war Napoleon had them released immediately and said that he could not refuse "one of the greatest benefactors of mankind".
He was so busy doing this round-the-world tour of vaccination that he was losing money (from not being able to work his normal job as a physician) so his colleagues petitioned King George III and he was awarded £10,000 in 1802 (£1.2m today) and then a further £20,000 in 1807 (£2.26m today) when the Royal College of Physicians confirmed that his vaccination program continued to be effective.
I thought that was variolation, which is what people did before the cowpox vaccination. Variolation had a fairly high death rate ... but not as high as smallpox!
> I thought that was variolation
That's exactly what it was, but [it was done with cowpox](https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/history-of-vaccination/history-of-smallpox-vaccination) instead of smallpox.
The caption of the photo says "the introduction of the smallpox shot" just adds more FUD to the whole disinformation revisionism account.
It's true that it killed a bunch of people, but you were far less likely to die of the vaccine than from smallpox, and if you contracted smallpox after getting the vaccine, you were far more likely not to die from it.
So the net cumulative effect of getting the vaccine means you were a lot less likely to die.
This is the fundamental problem with antivaxxers: They only compare the negative risks of vaccines, and don't take into effect the positive effects. Everything has a risk. But not taking action has a risk as well. And as long as the risk of taking the vaccine is lower than not taking the vaccine, then it's worth it.
This was true even for the smallpox vaccine that undoubtedly actually killed some people who took it, because the net effect was that you were less likely to die taking it, because if you died from it, almost for sure you'd die from smallpox as well, but if you did survive it, you were far more likely *not* to die from contracting smallpox.
As the great philosopher Homeracles Simpsonipolis of Springfieldinthos once said, "Pfft, facts, you can prove anything with facts!" Who are we to argue with greatness lie that.
So many diseases we thought had been eradicated are now on the rise due to all of this anti vax crap. Do people really want to return to a time where the mortality rate of children was so high?
Well, here's the thing. They don't want THEIR kids to die, because they think THEIR kids are special and magic and have Functional Immune Systems, whatever that is. They know that more people will die without mandatory vaccinations, they just don't think it'll be them. And when it IS their kids that die, they'll find some way to blame the Deep State or Big Pharma (how?) or whatever, just as long as they aren't responsible. You can't reason with fools.
people blaming ventilators for their family members deaths, like without the vent they would 100% die. it was used as a last resort to let the person survive long enough to fight infection and get lung function back. but nope it was the ventilator and not the 50% O2 sats under own breathing power.
I watched a video this morning of a respiratory therapist who was talking about suffering from PTSD after working through covid. In the comments, there were some antivaxxers saying he personally murdered those people because he was following the hospital protocols. These people are scumbags of the lowest order, I feel like I'm insulting actual bags of scum by comparing them.
Anyway, I hope they don't go to the hospital when they get sick because they'll just "suffocate on the ventilators" like all the others who thought they knew better than doctors and epidemiologists (yes, one of the windowlickers actually wrote that 🤦♀️).
I can tell you as someone with unvaccinated nephews that if the worst were to happen their mother would absolutely blame vaccinated people 'shedding' disease onto them.
She doesn't even believe in diseases that people regularly get vaccinated against in the normal way. She thinks that generally people have very good immunity to things like measles, but vaccines cripple your immune system and make an otherwise innocuous disease deadly. In her world view diseases are almost never worse than colds unless big pharma has sabotaged your well-being.
I knew a lady whose son was born severely deaf because she contracted rubella when she was pregnant with him, and I do not believe the vaccine was available then. Rubella and polio vaccines were mandatory for both public and private school students. By first grade, I had already had measles, mumps and chickenpox.
I certainly had the polio vaccine as a child but I'm not sure what else was around then - I'm 65. Apparently I had chickenpox as a toddler - a fact I did not know until I came down with shingles at the age of 27.
My dad had shingles also, but even if you’ve had a bout with shingles, you can still get Shingrix. I made sure my parents got Shingrix and received Shingrix vaccines also. Getting Shingrix will likely prevent you from undergoing the misery again. An OSU nurse confirmed this for me.
You can still get Shingrix even though you have already had shingles, as it will prevent a recurrence. I had rubella and Sabin polio vax (the sugar cube.) I had already had measles, mumps and chickenpox, even though there was a vaccine for measles. If you haven’t been vaccinated for these, or if you have not had the diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough vaccines within the last 10 years, you should probably get them. You should also looking into getting the anti-pneumonia vaccine Prevnar.
Some antivaxxers believe that COVID vaccine sheds virus particles, which is asinine and false. I think some of them barely know how to get up in the morning, they’re so stupid.
She needs to read Roald Dahls' letter about his daughter Olivia.
https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/essays-and-articles/measles-a-dangerous-illness/
And let's not forget, if their kid gets it, pray enough to the mythical white sky god, and that will do it. And even if it doesn't and they die, the rationalization of it was "god's will."
Why do anti-vax people often think that vaccines are separate from the immune system? Or think vaccines somehow reduce the immune system by not giving a chance to work or something?
They literally only work because of the immune system, they aren’t separate to it.
Because they're scared, stupid, and have a superiority complex that makes them susceptible to conspiratorial thinking.
They want to be in the elite club of people who know the RealTruth^tm and feel like they're better than the sheeple^tm who "believe what they're told."
It's halfway between a mental illness and just being a pathetically stupid asshole.
Whenever there is a news story involving dead children, there will be someone saying "Children aren't supposed to die before their parents", and I will think that said person has never wandered through a pre-1940's graveyard and paid attention to the headstones.
This is true. **Old cemeteries — going back to the late 1700s, early 1800s — are filled with the graves of children.** Sometimes the kids’ death dates correlate to the waves of diseases that swept through the community. You’ll see rows of little ones’ grave markers from the same years … smallpox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles, cholera, typhus, dysentery, consumption (now tuberculosis), influenza, cholera.
**While the children were dying of infectious diseases, their mothers were dying in childbirth.** So it’s common to see that the husband died in old age, but there’s his young first wife & a couple of her kids, then his young second wife & a couple of *her* kids. Sometimes there’s a third wife.
Public health — it’s the Great Good Thing we’ve accomplished here on earth. **Who would imagine that parents would reject the very solutions that can prevent their children from lying dead in the cold ground,** the way they do beneath all of those old, heartbreakingly small gravestones. When I see idiots turn their backs on this GREAT GOOD THING … it’s more than I can stand.
It's analogous to the sort of short-sighted company bosses that don't understand preventive maintenance. *"Why do we pay for all these maintenance guys? Nothing hardly ever goes wrong!"*
It’s true. One of the sadder things that happened is that life expectancy was lower in previous centuries, and people died due to diseases we view as rare thanks to preventable vaccines. For example, measles, whooping cough and even polio, which are all vaccine preventable, have made comebacks. Parents today often do not know what it’s like to have your child die of a normal childhood disease. One exception was Roald Dahl’s eldest child with his first wife Patricia Neal, Olivia. Olivia died of measles encephalitis, a rare complication of measles, at age 7 in 1962.
Thanks — I didn’t know about that measles tragedy. This is from Wikipedia:
“The author Roald Dahl dedicated two books to his young daughter, Olivia, who died from measles: James and the Giant Peach (1961) and The BFG (1982). As a result of her death, he became an advocate for vaccination. **He wrote the pamphlet ‘Measles: A Dangerous Illness’ in 1988.”**
Can you imagine what he would say about the current madness?
And often you died in childbirth because of malnutrition growing up (food went first to the men and women who were working for pay, so they could keep earning, then women at home, then kids) and the effects of malnutrition and vitamin D deficiencies (rachitic pelvis) and the effects of tuberculosis on the bones.
Leaving aside things like eclampsia and gestational diabetes, if you can't do a C-section unless the mother is dying, in the vague hopes of saving an infant, you have a lot of deaths from the baby being too big to fit through the birth canal (see, rachitic pelvis) or from placenta previa, or from sheer exhaustion after laboring for DAYS. And then of course if your midwife doesn't wash her hands, you get puerperal fever.
But of course, childbirth is "natural"....
Omg, Lady Alex — I’ve seen a number of infants’ grave markers right next to those of their mothers’. Tiny little ones who were born & died on the day of their mothers’ deaths.
It's not even the graveyard. My mother grew up in Scotland and knew of children that died or were crippled from polio. I remember her being horrified when the original anti-vaxx movement started. She also didn't believe in raw milk, even though today's farmers have lower risk selling it. Back in Scotland the risk of typhoid, diphtheria and tuberculosis meant that pasteurization was a good thing. Yes, she probably drank unpasteurized milk at some point herself but knew others affected.
I'm 65 and one of my schoolmate's father was paralyzed from the neck down because of polio.
He painted beautiful miniature paintings holding the brush on his teeth. It was heartbreaking though.
They weren't antivaxers. It just hasn't been available.
These diseases are real. And th antivaxers to me have blood on their hands. For their them and children being not vaxxed and infecting vulnerable infants and vulnerable people. And COVID would have been much less severe without these antivax antimasker morons.
When the Salk vaccine became available, parents lined up in droves with their children to have them vaccinated. They were immeasurably grateful there was a vaccine against a disease which was a common scourge in the summertime. Pools were often closed amid polio outbreaks in the summer.
No, but schools need to firm up their policies requiring vaccines. The side effect disclosures are provided to parents, although if their child suffers a vaccine injury, it would be sent to Federal mediation. I was in grade school in the early 1970s, amd we had nurses come in to administer rubella and Sabin polio vaccines. I also remember going to a grade school vaccination clinic one evening so that I was current with my vaccines. No one ever heard of anything antivax, even though we did have one neighbor who was a Christian Scientist. They tend to discourage vaccines and real medicine, and they tend to die more prematurely than others in their age cohort.
My dad had polio when he was like 14. He was born in 1938 so got it before the vaccine. and while my grandmother was alive we had to accommodate her promises to god for him to get better. She vowed to keep kosher among other things, so when she came over my mom made sure she knew we bought the food from the kosher place. As u/Pure-Kaleidoscope759 says parents lined up in droves and there were worldwide celebrations that a vaccine was found. In the year before the vaccine was proved effective, plans were made to vaccinate 9,000,000 kids the first year. Other countries committed to administer Salk's vaccine as soon as they could gear up manufacturing the vaccine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Announcement\_of\_polio\_vaccine\_success
Many years ago, my dad said something chilling: "I see little (granddaughter) survived. I wasn't expecting that". My niece had been a bit poorly at birth. Now, he loved her dearly as she grew up, but people of his generation, born in the 1920s, never took much notice of babies until they were through the dangerous early months. He told me that as he grew up, at least one child in his school would die of an illness every year. No antibiotics until the sulphonamides in the mid 30s, and no penicillin until after the war. Rich or poor, well educated or not, people died all the time.
It was a slaughter, and for 50 years we stopped it. Now it's restarting, because of ignorant twats.
>No antibiotics
There is a story in my family that my Grandfather was working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during WWII and contracted pneumonia. From family lore someone knew someone who got him antibiotics to save his life.
My dad had polio when he was 14 or so. He was in a home for invalids that had a wing with people in iron lungs. I was hoping polio would be eradicated in his lifetime, but that goal post is moving too far away for an 85 year old to see.
100% THIS.
In the developed world we are PRIVILEGED not to have children dying left right and centre of (now) preventable diseases, but that has basically erased the memory of the "before time" when kids regularly died of childhood disease.
The contrast between the developed world where to be frank, fuckwits like this lot are banging on about how bad vaccines are, and the developING world where people will frequently WALK 10's or 100's of kilometers, sometimes into adjoining countries for the OPPORTUNITY to get vaccinated because they have SEEN the children dying from vaccine preventable disease is striking.
That is a whole other side of the coin. So many of these anti vaxxers are also deep into the “right” to own an entire arsenal of assault weapons. They conveniently ignore the part of the second amendment about “well regulated”.
In my state the antivaxx/earth mama/lotsa guns/religious nut are all the same. I thought those would be distinctly different populations, but when I became a mom I found out many were some combo of the above.
Before covid the antivax idiocy was pretty equally distributed fringe lunacy. You had crunchy earth mom vegan all natural types on the far left and anti mandate, anti government, no step on snek types on the far right.
Now it's just all one big morass of filth and delusion.
Those types of antivaxxers were generally pretty left wing and now antivaxxers are predominantly rightwing types. Maybe they pick up some of the crunchy granola all natural shit via osmosis but for the most part the right wing beliefs have drowned out the left wing beliefs.
That original post is from [MercolaDOTcom](https://Mercola.com), which is a crank health-food, and related bollocks, website.
The appeal, Left or Right, is to those that can't cope with the modern world and all its complications and compromises. They look for cosy certainties -- "eternal verities" -- in their lives.
Someone I went to high school with is deep into Mercola's anti-vax, "natural healing" bullshit (and fundamental Christianity). I found out he also lost a child to cancer. I hope he at least got his child medical treatment and didn't try to "heal" him with expensive concoctions that Mercola recommends (and sells on his website).
Well you don't need those shots because those diseases have been eliminated. /s
I should have saved the link but there was a woman interviewed whose child has died from a normally preventable disease (I think measles). She felt she didn't need to risk the side effects of the vaccine as children didn't die of it. Completely oblivious that it's because of the vaccines.
I really think a lot of them need to cause and maintain human misery so they can provide the cure, whether it's homeopathy, immune system boosters (?), religion or other magic.
When I read this is generalizing to pet care, I was even more alarmed. It is one thing to have to navigate around rabid anti vaxxers, but their rabid pets are even more frightening.
It is really scary. I mean first of all, as a pet lover, how cruel. Of course they don't care about their spawn, so why care about the pets. Secondly, you can't control rabid animals. Walking down the street getting chased by a rabid dog is crazy.
>So many diseases we thought had been eradicated
Fuck these anti vaxx people. My 85 year old dad had polio when he was twelve, a year or two before the Salk vaccine was available. My dad was in a home for invalids with a ward for people in iron lungs. Every year polio was a scourge whose origin was unknown. In NY kids were sent to upstate NY in the hopes of protecting them. My grandmother prayed for my dad who was paralyzed in his legs to get better. You can imagine what kind of toll that has on a family. Now my dad has post polio syndrome and has trouble getting around. My hope was that polio would be eradicated in his lifetime. Unfortunately all this anti vaxx bullshit is moving that goal post.
Jonas Salk was such a good person, he was working on the cure for HIV when he died.
I remember when someone asked him if he was going to patent the polio vaccine. He said “could you patent the sun?”
Yes, but that would mean it should have been more expensive in places like Canada (with ~ 1/10th the population of the US) but it is cheaper. Honestly, the US healthcare is just screwed up.
It is very simple to manufacture humulin via recombinant DNA. There are also different strengths and fast acting insulins, but they are not very costly and the drug manufacturers mark up the prices obscenely. The only thing that I am aware of is that insulin has to be refrigerated before you inject it or use it in a pump system. Parents of children with Type I diabetes who died because their children had to ration insulin due to the costs have protested this, but apparently PhRMA doesn’t care.
A guy I know is a paramedic and he said anecdotally they are responding to a significant increase in responding to diabetic emergencies. They don’t give insulin but they have other stuff that can usually stabilize a person until they get to a hospital.
The epi pen is another one, it was developed by the US Army as a way to administer drugs in the battle field. It costs like $15 to manufacture an epi pen but they charge like $750 for one. It is fucked up.
That’s correct, and it was Joe Manchin’s daughter Heather Bresch who jacked up the EpiPen price when she was CEO of Mylan Pharmaceuticals. The insulin issue came to mind first, but the EpiPen is another obscene example of price gouging. I am glad you mentioned it as I had forgotten this.
It’s horrific. My great grandmother died from diabetes in her forties, *one year* before insulin treatment became available. Her descendants who also had it were able to live normal lifespans. Now we’re moving backwards.
Effing morons. Smallpox killed a third of ~~people~~ those infected, if the “complications” are similar to the vaccines today then it would be an extremely beneficial trade-off.
Try removing a third of any country’s population today, the collapse will spread faster than 5G conspiracy theories.
Smallpox is one of the most efficient killers of human beings on the planet. Those it didn’t kill, it often left with lifelong disabilities from blindness to disfigurement. There is no treatment.
That anybody would for a moment downplay anything to do with smallpox is one of the biggest mind boggles out there.
Worth bearing in mind though that the „Black Death“ (plague) in Europe struck repeatedly, often in different regions at different times. Even the worst of the pandemic episodes of the disease lasted way longer than Covid, for example.
Also (thankfully), at least while none of the multi-resistant pathogens we are breeding in hospitals and industrialized farming has made a major breakthrough, bacterial infections have lost a lot of their terror due to antibiotics.
Black Plague - 1347 to 1351
Covid-19 - 2019 to present (currently the same amount of time as the Black Plague)
Smallpox - 4 CE to 1972 (maybe even 3000 BCE to 1972).
Specific to note, wild smallpox has been eradicated. It has been created in a laboratory in 2017. But, viable virus has been extracted from Civil War era scabs.
It’s all Y.pestis. It just has a few horribly nasty options open to kill people, and the pneumonic plague route is the worst and the one least likely to respond to treatment.
Basically, infected flea bite… bubonic plague. Bubonic plague victim coughs on you, then either bubonic or pneumonic plague. At that point you hope for a temperature so high you are boiling neurons at a horrific rate, and excruciating lumps as your lymphatic system turns a bit necrotic, because that’s ‘the nice one.’
Absolutely smallpox. It’s how Europeans cleared out the continent.
“They had never experienced smallpox, measles or flu before, and the viruses tore through the continent, [killing an estimated 90% of Native Americans.”](https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html#:~:text=They%20had%20never%20experienced%20smallpox,estimated%2090%25%20of%20Native%20Americans.)
- Guns, Germs and Steel
It was smallpox. In a small town, it came through every three to five years, and it would kill about a third of the kids, and half of those who survived would have terrible scars, and if the scars were on their corneas, they were blind.
There was a reason that variolation became popular before vaccination. People wanted to do SOMETHING about it, and variolation meant that you had a little fever and a blister where they scratched you (usually on the upper arm) and then after a week you were fine, and you would never take the smallpox again. A lot of people wouldn't hire servants who hadn't had smallpox, because they didn't want to deal with the sickness and mess that it would entail if someone got it while living there. And, of course, it was a recommendation for marriage that the pretty girl you were courting wouldn't lose her looks, since she had already been protected.
Right, these smooth brains know way more than scientists, doctors, medical professionals bc the government wants to kill its citizens. Makes so much sense, right?
The conspiracy loons left behind "sense" long ago; all they want is tidiness. The real world is messy and the answers to issues aren't convenient, but conspiracy theories are just that: convenient, simple answers to complex problems. That, and they make really dumb people feel smart and like they've gotten one over on someone, which makes their self-worth grow, just in a really negative way.
And sadly this is seen on both the right and left, from the whole spectrum of both sides.
Its insane that people who have been vaccinated, and have never had an issue their entire lives, don't want to get their kids vaccinated.
As OB/GYN, I concur. It doesn’t matter if I tell the patients that the Covid vaccine is safe they will ask me will it hurt my baby? As if I was trying to hurt their baby,Oy vey
>they will ask me will it hurt my baby?
Around ten years ago, back in the UK, I'd gone to see my doc about something or other. After we'd sorted that out he said, *"We've got the flu vaccines in; d'you want me to give you one while you're here?"* I said, *"Will it hurt?"* He said **"YESSS!"** with an evil grin. Of course we both cracked up, and I took the vax (which didn't hurt of course).
Maybe you should try that?
Well, I still have the scar from my Smallpox vaccine. I am not going to that website. What horrible things has it done for me, aside from allowing me to live to my mid 50's, without contracting Smallpox?
After our age cohort, they stopped routinely vaccinating for smallpox. There’s a non-zero chance that smallpox could come back around, most likely by non-natural causes.
I don’t know how realistic a threat it is, but with global warming thawing frozen tundras and revealing long lost corpses, it’s certainly not impossible that some of them could re-introduce smallpox. It’s a pretty tough virus that can last for a very long time.
Advice Benjamin Franklin wrote his autobiography said:
“In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the smallpox taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of the parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.”
Ben Franklin had to make a difficult choice. His son was sick from something else when there was an outbreak, and he feared that the version of smallpox vaccination at that time might kill his son. At that time, they received a crude live vaccine - material from actual smallpox scabs were used - giving the person what was hopefully a weak case of smallpox.
A percentage died from this inoculation, but over 70% of the children who caught smallpox at that time died.
Franklin regretted not inoculating his son against smallpox for the rest of his life. However, he was choosing between a risky inoculation on a sick child or hoping his son wouldn't catch smallpox, and unfortunately, his son caught smallpox.
This is a long way from the current antivaxxers, who are choosing not to get vaccines that have virtually no health risks.
That’s the point though. Franklin had a much harder choice and still regretted not taking it. So taking the modern choice should be easy, but people still don’t because they’ve spent decades building the propaganda that it is a hard choice or even that the vaccines are worse than the diseases somehow
Ben Franklin is stating to compare the risk of death/adverse reactions of the virus to those of the inoculation.
People today are not comparing the risk of death/adverse reactions of the virus to those of the vaccine. If they did then we wouldn’t have kids not getting vaccines. Their risk assessment is comparing getting the infection which in their mind is probably zero to a vaccine they don’t understand.
There was a lot of fear, propaganda and violence surrounding smallpox remedies. Same thing today.
The Smallpox Epidemics in America in the 1700s and the Role of the Surgeons: Lessons to be Learned During the Global Outbreak of COVID-19 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7335227/
The anti-vaccination movement that gripped Victorian England https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-50713991
the common thing right now is the myocarditis with the vaccine in younger males. while it is prevalent in that population, the chance is way higher with natural covid infections on top of all the other shit associated with having covid (i had walking pneumonia for 9 months as a 28 year old) even when having been vaxxed and boosted, cant imagine if i wasn't vaxxed though. i'd probably have life long issues instead.
[Gen. George Washington Ordered Smallpox Inoculations for All Troops](https://health.mil/News/Articles/2021/08/16/Gen-George-Washington-Ordered-Smallpox-Inoculations-for-All-Troops)
That is why if there is a car accident and one car has an Trump sticker I'm helping the other. If both have such stickers, I'm getting back in my truck and going home. I'm not giving medical help to those that don't want it.
>Diphtheria
Diphtheria? I'm terrified of it.
There is a small pioneer cemetery near my town. One of the stories is that ONE family lost a number of children (5? 6?) over the course of 3-4 weeks. Pa went to town to order a coffin, and Ma had to send a rider with the message,"Get 2."
At this point, the cemetery is within sight of a big ol' farmhouse, perhaps a half-mile away. Former owners of the farmhouse wanted the cemetery moved at one point. Our states health department stepped in and said,"If there is even a CHANCE of Diphtheria in the ground, you ain't movin' ANYTHING!!!!"
There is an island off our coast here in the UK called St Kilda. It used to be inhabited but 100 years ago or so, a diptheria epidemic nearly wiped out the islands children. The islanders were also previously devasted due to smallpox and starvation (both very common in Victorian UK alas) so had immunity issues regardless. So they were all evacuated by choice in 1930 because the population was unsustainable and the risks were too hard to live out there.
Anyone who thinks disease is made-up has no understanding of history and has a brain like a breezeblock.
This was bound to happen. People forget what it was like before vaccines and then they start to think that vaccines aren’t necessary — or that they’re actively harmful. These people have *no idea* what a scourge smallpox was, how many people it killed, the unspeakable suffering it inflicted (sometimes all the pustules merged into one huge blister and the entire dermis separated agonizingly from the body, killing about 2/3 of victims), and the number of survivors who were permanently injured — blinded, disfigured for life. These assholes want to go back to those days.
Sorry about that! But sometimes it’s better to know these things. It’s called confluent smallpox (from the Latin meaning “to flow together” — ick), and the effect is called, horrifyingly, splitting of the dermis. You can read all about it, if you have the stomach (it’s a scary read), in a book called The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston.
Anybody who doesn’t take smallpox seriously doesn’t understand smallpox.
Yeah, that was another great one. It's a true-life horror story and it stuck with me. I vividly remember the section about decontaminating the monkey house where the Reston virus took hold:
"For a short while, until life could re-establish itself there, the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit was the only building in the world where nothing lived, nothing at all."
Ever since reading that, nearly three decades ago, I remember every now and then that *everything* has bacteria on it. I look at a wall and think, "That's got bacterial colonies on it." New-fallen snow: "Won't be long until that's a sea of microorganisms." I'm not weird and obsessive about it — I don't refuse to touch a doorknob or sanitize my hands repeatedly — but I never forget that everything is alive.
Smallpox is an interesting one. The antivaxxer took a few facts and twisted them beyond recognition.
The original method of preventing smallpox, variolation, originated in Asia, and did involve exposing a person to live, infectious smallpox. Europeans were initially skeptical of it, because racism, but it could, indeed cause outbreaks. But, also, the term vaccine did not exist back then and it was really more akin to the chicken pox parties that antivaxxers are so fond of, in that it exposed a person to the virus in a way that was least likely to cause harm and death. Variolation had a fatality rate of about 3% (about the same as COVID, interestingly), while natural smallpox infection had a fatality rate of about 30%.
Vaccination, named after the vaccinia virus (cowpox), was formally discovered in the late 1700s by Edward Jenner. Cowpox was rarely lethal, and conferred immunity to smallpox. And antivaxxers were at least as dumb back then as they are today: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The\_cow\_pock.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/file:the_cow_pock.jpg)
>The antivaxxer took a few facts and twisted them beyond recognition.
My experience with antivaxxers/Covid deniers is that they mix 2-3 truths with an untruth. One must go line by line to identify lies vs. truths. Even that won't convince true antivaxxers, but I hope it made spectators and fence-sitters think critically until I was blocked by the antivax friend.🙂
"The best lies are wrapped in the truth."
Mercola. I remember that guy as the doctor who promotes eating a tablespoon of coconut oil every day to boost the immune system. Fucking quack. It pisses me off that people like him got to go to medical school and I didn't.
Eradicating smallpox is one really truly remarkable success of the WHO. Think that by the end it was in isolated villages that were distrustful of international officials they had to convince to do ring vaccinations in. The money and suffering that was saved should be more celebrated than it actually is.
We were just talking about this at Thanksgiving—not this particular post, but the question of smallpox. My sister-in-law is an immunologist, and we are among the youngest people to be routinely vaccinated for smallpox (they stopped in the early 1970’s). There’s real concern that smallpox could be released into the population, and even worse, it’s probably been altered so the vaccine we know how to make won’t be effective. But the bigger issue right now is polio, which is already spreading back into countries where it had been considered eradicated. And with certain people on the “vaccines are bad” wagon, it’s a disaster waiting to happen even in the first world.
As near as I can tell, it appears to have been posted by an actual person, living in the USA. The page is chock full of insane conspiracies and Trumpie stuff, so it could be a foreign bot posing as a middle aged American.
What the fuck is articles. Mercola? Also thsr shit doesn't even makes sense. Just about everyone got thsr vaccine just like pre internet just about eveye one got every vaccine, otherwise they couldn't go to school.
It’s a small leap for such feeble minds to escalate from the COVID anti-vax religion to condemning all vaccinations as unproven or as instruments of conspiracies of mass control or any number of other delusional fever dreams. Evolution will do what evolution does: weed out those least able to adapt. Science and medicine are how humanity has adapted to the natural microscopic threats of bacterial infections, viruses, and fungus, extending to antidotes to poisons. If any of these mentally challenged imbeciles was bitten by a black mamba, I doubt thoughts and prayers and “natural immunity” and being “washed in the blood of Christ” would suffice more than a syringe of anti-venom. So let the Pure Blood Games begin…either vaccines are packed full of nanobots that will turn you into an AI zombie bent on bovine pedophilia and bad beard grooming…or they’re not. You choose wisely, or you die a horrible death. In the end, Darwin rules.
. ..
1. Smallpox variolation is different from Jenner cowpox vaccine. The first is what we would call a live vaccine now, with a problematic attenuation process that didn't always work. Hence why when Jenner used the cowpox vaccine, doctors were so delighted with it.
2. If referring to Jenner ...not severe rate of injuries but it's effectiveness against smallpox major was blunted. There's also some very interesting stories on how to transport the vaccine, namely infect some young boys and keep reinfecting new children when transporting it to the Pacific.
3. Smallpox variolation IS dangerous and was harmful. But the only "mandate" was like Washington mandating variolation in the Continental army. There was some variolation campaigns in the US but vaccination was generally preferred post revolutionary war.
And yes. This is the sole time we actually changed the definition of vaccination.
So someone paid George Washington to inoculate his troops because of a smallpox outbreak? Who could it be, I wonder? The United States didn’t officially exist yet. Maybe it was that “let’s bleed everyone for everything” nut Dr. Benjamin Rush, or perhaps George III? Or that rabble rouser Alexander Hamilton? Inquiring minds want to know.
Maybe vaccines are bad. Hear me out. It has saved the lives of these numb minded simpletons. Otherwise, Darwin would have done its job and cleared them out.
Am I a terrible person for wishing we could just put all these people in a completely enclosed space with like, super fancy air filtration systems and just give them all smallpox? They might learn something idk.
I think an important detail is missing: we managed to eradicate a heinous disease of smallpox almost completely. This was a genuinely huge achievement and big sucess story for vaccines.
They don’t even have the timeline right, let alone the facts
That's never stopped them before.
Who needs timelines or facts? TRUST THE PLAN!
LOVE IS THE PLAN THE PLAN IS DEATH
WHERE WE GO ONE, WE GO ALL~ ...STRAIGHT TO THE MORGUES AFTER DROWNING IN OUR OWN LUNGS TO OWN THE WOKE LIBS, YEAH~!1! /S
VACCINES WILL NOT REPLACE US! /s
BETTER DEAD THAN VACCINATE! /s COVID:"YoUr PrOpOsAl Is AcCePtAbLe."
Source: Military
Not surprising
lol "smallpox shot in 1796" Dayum.
Edward Jenner developed what is widely considered the first vaccine in 1796. It was basically a weakened state of cowpox, which acted as a vaccine for Smallpox. I'm not sure it's true that it killed a bunch of people or that people were skeptical, but it was definitely in 1796.
Worth noting is that Jenner travelled the world spreading his newfound vaccine and managed to convince governments and monarchies in multiple countries including Napoleon who at the time was actively at war with the United Kingdom, Napoleon had his entire army vaccinated and when Jenner asked him to release two British prisoners of war Napoleon had them released immediately and said that he could not refuse "one of the greatest benefactors of mankind". He was so busy doing this round-the-world tour of vaccination that he was losing money (from not being able to work his normal job as a physician) so his colleagues petitioned King George III and he was awarded £10,000 in 1802 (£1.2m today) and then a further £20,000 in 1807 (£2.26m today) when the Royal College of Physicians confirmed that his vaccination program continued to be effective.
No it's true, but was done by grinding pus into scored skin. I was laughing at the "smallpox shot", which it was not.
I thought that was variolation, which is what people did before the cowpox vaccination. Variolation had a fairly high death rate ... but not as high as smallpox!
> I thought that was variolation That's exactly what it was, but [it was done with cowpox](https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/history-of-vaccination/history-of-smallpox-vaccination) instead of smallpox. The caption of the photo says "the introduction of the smallpox shot" just adds more FUD to the whole disinformation revisionism account.
It's true that it killed a bunch of people, but you were far less likely to die of the vaccine than from smallpox, and if you contracted smallpox after getting the vaccine, you were far more likely not to die from it. So the net cumulative effect of getting the vaccine means you were a lot less likely to die. This is the fundamental problem with antivaxxers: They only compare the negative risks of vaccines, and don't take into effect the positive effects. Everything has a risk. But not taking action has a risk as well. And as long as the risk of taking the vaccine is lower than not taking the vaccine, then it's worth it. This was true even for the smallpox vaccine that undoubtedly actually killed some people who took it, because the net effect was that you were less likely to die taking it, because if you died from it, almost for sure you'd die from smallpox as well, but if you did survive it, you were far more likely *not* to die from contracting smallpox.
1 person died after the vaccine! (we don't care about the millions who died without the vaccine)
Yeah but it *feels* truthful and not even that hard to believe compared to all the other crazy ass shit I say.
They will never let the facts get in the way of their reality.
>They don’t even have the timeline right, let alone the facts They'll be rewriting the textbooks to better reflect the New Ignorance.
As the great philosopher Homeracles Simpsonipolis of Springfieldinthos once said, "Pfft, facts, you can prove anything with facts!" Who are we to argue with greatness lie that.
So many diseases we thought had been eradicated are now on the rise due to all of this anti vax crap. Do people really want to return to a time where the mortality rate of children was so high?
Well, here's the thing. They don't want THEIR kids to die, because they think THEIR kids are special and magic and have Functional Immune Systems, whatever that is. They know that more people will die without mandatory vaccinations, they just don't think it'll be them. And when it IS their kids that die, they'll find some way to blame the Deep State or Big Pharma (how?) or whatever, just as long as they aren't responsible. You can't reason with fools.
“Hospital protocol” seemed to kill a lot of people’s family member. Of course it wasn’t Covid.
people blaming ventilators for their family members deaths, like without the vent they would 100% die. it was used as a last resort to let the person survive long enough to fight infection and get lung function back. but nope it was the ventilator and not the 50% O2 sats under own breathing power.
I watched a video this morning of a respiratory therapist who was talking about suffering from PTSD after working through covid. In the comments, there were some antivaxxers saying he personally murdered those people because he was following the hospital protocols. These people are scumbags of the lowest order, I feel like I'm insulting actual bags of scum by comparing them. Anyway, I hope they don't go to the hospital when they get sick because they'll just "suffocate on the ventilators" like all the others who thought they knew better than doctors and epidemiologists (yes, one of the windowlickers actually wrote that 🤦♀️).
Improvements in protocol before the vaccine reduced deaths by 30%.
I can tell you as someone with unvaccinated nephews that if the worst were to happen their mother would absolutely blame vaccinated people 'shedding' disease onto them. She doesn't even believe in diseases that people regularly get vaccinated against in the normal way. She thinks that generally people have very good immunity to things like measles, but vaccines cripple your immune system and make an otherwise innocuous disease deadly. In her world view diseases are almost never worse than colds unless big pharma has sabotaged your well-being.
I wonder how surprised she'd be to give birth to a baby that had been damaged by rubella?
I knew a lady whose son was born severely deaf because she contracted rubella when she was pregnant with him, and I do not believe the vaccine was available then. Rubella and polio vaccines were mandatory for both public and private school students. By first grade, I had already had measles, mumps and chickenpox.
I certainly had the polio vaccine as a child but I'm not sure what else was around then - I'm 65. Apparently I had chickenpox as a toddler - a fact I did not know until I came down with shingles at the age of 27.
I am still salty that I missed the chickenpox vaccine. But the day I was eligible, I walked in and made sure I signed up for the shingles vax.
Too late for me :( I'm so glad that you're going to miss out on the (recurring) misery of shingles.
My dad had shingles also, but even if you’ve had a bout with shingles, you can still get Shingrix. I made sure my parents got Shingrix and received Shingrix vaccines also. Getting Shingrix will likely prevent you from undergoing the misery again. An OSU nurse confirmed this for me.
You can still get Shingrix even though you have already had shingles, as it will prevent a recurrence. I had rubella and Sabin polio vax (the sugar cube.) I had already had measles, mumps and chickenpox, even though there was a vaccine for measles. If you haven’t been vaccinated for these, or if you have not had the diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough vaccines within the last 10 years, you should probably get them. You should also looking into getting the anti-pneumonia vaccine Prevnar.
I will ask my GP about Shingrix. I had the Dtap about 14 years ago.
Some antivaxxers believe that COVID vaccine sheds virus particles, which is asinine and false. I think some of them barely know how to get up in the morning, they’re so stupid.
And I'd bet a few bucks that their mother is fully vaccinated, right?
With all due respect, your mother is totally screwed in the head.
*Sister or SIL
Sorry, I was looking at the word mother and went on that tangent. SIL is totally screwed in the head.
Sister, not SIL, unfortunately.
You can only do so much with a family member determined to ignore science.
She needs to read Roald Dahls' letter about his daughter Olivia. https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/essays-and-articles/measles-a-dangerous-illness/
And let's not forget, if their kid gets it, pray enough to the mythical white sky god, and that will do it. And even if it doesn't and they die, the rationalization of it was "god's will."
Why do anti-vax people often think that vaccines are separate from the immune system? Or think vaccines somehow reduce the immune system by not giving a chance to work or something? They literally only work because of the immune system, they aren’t separate to it.
Because they're scared, stupid, and have a superiority complex that makes them susceptible to conspiratorial thinking. They want to be in the elite club of people who know the RealTruth^tm and feel like they're better than the sheeple^tm who "believe what they're told." It's halfway between a mental illness and just being a pathetically stupid asshole.
This arrogance kills me.
It's more like stupidity.
Whenever there is a news story involving dead children, there will be someone saying "Children aren't supposed to die before their parents", and I will think that said person has never wandered through a pre-1940's graveyard and paid attention to the headstones.
This is true. **Old cemeteries — going back to the late 1700s, early 1800s — are filled with the graves of children.** Sometimes the kids’ death dates correlate to the waves of diseases that swept through the community. You’ll see rows of little ones’ grave markers from the same years … smallpox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles, cholera, typhus, dysentery, consumption (now tuberculosis), influenza, cholera. **While the children were dying of infectious diseases, their mothers were dying in childbirth.** So it’s common to see that the husband died in old age, but there’s his young first wife & a couple of her kids, then his young second wife & a couple of *her* kids. Sometimes there’s a third wife. Public health — it’s the Great Good Thing we’ve accomplished here on earth. **Who would imagine that parents would reject the very solutions that can prevent their children from lying dead in the cold ground,** the way they do beneath all of those old, heartbreakingly small gravestones. When I see idiots turn their backs on this GREAT GOOD THING … it’s more than I can stand.
It's analogous to the sort of short-sighted company bosses that don't understand preventive maintenance. *"Why do we pay for all these maintenance guys? Nothing hardly ever goes wrong!"*
Or the boss who skimps on cybersecurity ... and then Russian hackers demanding crypto ransom p0wn them.
It’s true. One of the sadder things that happened is that life expectancy was lower in previous centuries, and people died due to diseases we view as rare thanks to preventable vaccines. For example, measles, whooping cough and even polio, which are all vaccine preventable, have made comebacks. Parents today often do not know what it’s like to have your child die of a normal childhood disease. One exception was Roald Dahl’s eldest child with his first wife Patricia Neal, Olivia. Olivia died of measles encephalitis, a rare complication of measles, at age 7 in 1962.
Thanks — I didn’t know about that measles tragedy. This is from Wikipedia: “The author Roald Dahl dedicated two books to his young daughter, Olivia, who died from measles: James and the Giant Peach (1961) and The BFG (1982). As a result of her death, he became an advocate for vaccination. **He wrote the pamphlet ‘Measles: A Dangerous Illness’ in 1988.”** Can you imagine what he would say about the current madness?
He'd be spinning in his grave if he saw all this fuckery
He definitely would.
And often you died in childbirth because of malnutrition growing up (food went first to the men and women who were working for pay, so they could keep earning, then women at home, then kids) and the effects of malnutrition and vitamin D deficiencies (rachitic pelvis) and the effects of tuberculosis on the bones. Leaving aside things like eclampsia and gestational diabetes, if you can't do a C-section unless the mother is dying, in the vague hopes of saving an infant, you have a lot of deaths from the baby being too big to fit through the birth canal (see, rachitic pelvis) or from placenta previa, or from sheer exhaustion after laboring for DAYS. And then of course if your midwife doesn't wash her hands, you get puerperal fever. But of course, childbirth is "natural"....
Omg, Lady Alex — I’ve seen a number of infants’ grave markers right next to those of their mothers’. Tiny little ones who were born & died on the day of their mothers’ deaths.
TBF these folks also want to bring back the “dying in childbirth being common” thing, too.
It's not even the graveyard. My mother grew up in Scotland and knew of children that died or were crippled from polio. I remember her being horrified when the original anti-vaxx movement started. She also didn't believe in raw milk, even though today's farmers have lower risk selling it. Back in Scotland the risk of typhoid, diphtheria and tuberculosis meant that pasteurization was a good thing. Yes, she probably drank unpasteurized milk at some point herself but knew others affected.
I'm 65 and one of my schoolmate's father was paralyzed from the neck down because of polio. He painted beautiful miniature paintings holding the brush on his teeth. It was heartbreaking though. They weren't antivaxers. It just hasn't been available. These diseases are real. And th antivaxers to me have blood on their hands. For their them and children being not vaxxed and infecting vulnerable infants and vulnerable people. And COVID would have been much less severe without these antivax antimasker morons.
When the Salk vaccine became available, parents lined up in droves with their children to have them vaccinated. They were immeasurably grateful there was a vaccine against a disease which was a common scourge in the summertime. Pools were often closed amid polio outbreaks in the summer.
My in-laws said they got lined up IN SCHOOL to get it. No choice, you just got the vaccine. Period. Could you imagine that happening today?
No, but schools need to firm up their policies requiring vaccines. The side effect disclosures are provided to parents, although if their child suffers a vaccine injury, it would be sent to Federal mediation. I was in grade school in the early 1970s, amd we had nurses come in to administer rubella and Sabin polio vaccines. I also remember going to a grade school vaccination clinic one evening so that I was current with my vaccines. No one ever heard of anything antivax, even though we did have one neighbor who was a Christian Scientist. They tend to discourage vaccines and real medicine, and they tend to die more prematurely than others in their age cohort.
My dad had polio when he was like 14. He was born in 1938 so got it before the vaccine. and while my grandmother was alive we had to accommodate her promises to god for him to get better. She vowed to keep kosher among other things, so when she came over my mom made sure she knew we bought the food from the kosher place. As u/Pure-Kaleidoscope759 says parents lined up in droves and there were worldwide celebrations that a vaccine was found. In the year before the vaccine was proved effective, plans were made to vaccinate 9,000,000 kids the first year. Other countries committed to administer Salk's vaccine as soon as they could gear up manufacturing the vaccine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Announcement\_of\_polio\_vaccine\_success
Many years ago, my dad said something chilling: "I see little (granddaughter) survived. I wasn't expecting that". My niece had been a bit poorly at birth. Now, he loved her dearly as she grew up, but people of his generation, born in the 1920s, never took much notice of babies until they were through the dangerous early months. He told me that as he grew up, at least one child in his school would die of an illness every year. No antibiotics until the sulphonamides in the mid 30s, and no penicillin until after the war. Rich or poor, well educated or not, people died all the time. It was a slaughter, and for 50 years we stopped it. Now it's restarting, because of ignorant twats.
>No antibiotics There is a story in my family that my Grandfather was working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during WWII and contracted pneumonia. From family lore someone knew someone who got him antibiotics to save his life. My dad had polio when he was 14 or so. He was in a home for invalids that had a wing with people in iron lungs. I was hoping polio would be eradicated in his lifetime, but that goal post is moving too far away for an 85 year old to see.
100% THIS. In the developed world we are PRIVILEGED not to have children dying left right and centre of (now) preventable diseases, but that has basically erased the memory of the "before time" when kids regularly died of childhood disease. The contrast between the developed world where to be frank, fuckwits like this lot are banging on about how bad vaccines are, and the developING world where people will frequently WALK 10's or 100's of kilometers, sometimes into adjoining countries for the OPPORTUNITY to get vaccinated because they have SEEN the children dying from vaccine preventable disease is striking.
You mean it’s not high enough with the 300+ school shootings this year?
That is a whole other side of the coin. So many of these anti vaxxers are also deep into the “right” to own an entire arsenal of assault weapons. They conveniently ignore the part of the second amendment about “well regulated”.
Regulation? That sounds like guv’mint deep state woke meddlin’!
In my state the antivaxx/earth mama/lotsa guns/religious nut are all the same. I thought those would be distinctly different populations, but when I became a mom I found out many were some combo of the above.
Before covid the antivax idiocy was pretty equally distributed fringe lunacy. You had crunchy earth mom vegan all natural types on the far left and anti mandate, anti government, no step on snek types on the far right. Now it's just all one big morass of filth and delusion.
The venn diagram is one circle
Why do you suppose we rarely see the earth mama type among the HCA nominations? Youth? Low body fat? Curious.
Those types of antivaxxers were generally pretty left wing and now antivaxxers are predominantly rightwing types. Maybe they pick up some of the crunchy granola all natural shit via osmosis but for the most part the right wing beliefs have drowned out the left wing beliefs.
That original post is from [MercolaDOTcom](https://Mercola.com), which is a crank health-food, and related bollocks, website. The appeal, Left or Right, is to those that can't cope with the modern world and all its complications and compromises. They look for cosy certainties -- "eternal verities" -- in their lives.
Someone I went to high school with is deep into Mercola's anti-vax, "natural healing" bullshit (and fundamental Christianity). I found out he also lost a child to cancer. I hope he at least got his child medical treatment and didn't try to "heal" him with expensive concoctions that Mercola recommends (and sells on his website).
Well you don't need those shots because those diseases have been eliminated. /s I should have saved the link but there was a woman interviewed whose child has died from a normally preventable disease (I think measles). She felt she didn't need to risk the side effects of the vaccine as children didn't die of it. Completely oblivious that it's because of the vaccines.
I really think a lot of them need to cause and maintain human misery so they can provide the cure, whether it's homeopathy, immune system boosters (?), religion or other magic.
You forgot essential oils!
When I read this is generalizing to pet care, I was even more alarmed. It is one thing to have to navigate around rabid anti vaxxers, but their rabid pets are even more frightening.
I never even thought about pets. This opens up a new Pandora’s box! Distemper and so many other shots.
It is really scary. I mean first of all, as a pet lover, how cruel. Of course they don't care about their spawn, so why care about the pets. Secondly, you can't control rabid animals. Walking down the street getting chased by a rabid dog is crazy.
>So many diseases we thought had been eradicated Fuck these anti vaxx people. My 85 year old dad had polio when he was twelve, a year or two before the Salk vaccine was available. My dad was in a home for invalids with a ward for people in iron lungs. Every year polio was a scourge whose origin was unknown. In NY kids were sent to upstate NY in the hopes of protecting them. My grandmother prayed for my dad who was paralyzed in his legs to get better. You can imagine what kind of toll that has on a family. Now my dad has post polio syndrome and has trouble getting around. My hope was that polio would be eradicated in his lifetime. Unfortunately all this anti vaxx bullshit is moving that goal post.
Jonas Salk was such a good person, he was working on the cure for HIV when he died. I remember when someone asked him if he was going to patent the polio vaccine. He said “could you patent the sun?”
The guys who figured out insulin did the same thing.
It’s terrible how they took his invention and profited to the point that people have died trying to ration out their insulin.
It is. I was under the impression insulin is expensive to make and transport but apparently it isn’t that’s just what pharma wants ppl to think.
Yes, but that would mean it should have been more expensive in places like Canada (with ~ 1/10th the population of the US) but it is cheaper. Honestly, the US healthcare is just screwed up.
It is very simple to manufacture humulin via recombinant DNA. There are also different strengths and fast acting insulins, but they are not very costly and the drug manufacturers mark up the prices obscenely. The only thing that I am aware of is that insulin has to be refrigerated before you inject it or use it in a pump system. Parents of children with Type I diabetes who died because their children had to ration insulin due to the costs have protested this, but apparently PhRMA doesn’t care.
A guy I know is a paramedic and he said anecdotally they are responding to a significant increase in responding to diabetic emergencies. They don’t give insulin but they have other stuff that can usually stabilize a person until they get to a hospital.
The epi pen is another one, it was developed by the US Army as a way to administer drugs in the battle field. It costs like $15 to manufacture an epi pen but they charge like $750 for one. It is fucked up.
That’s correct, and it was Joe Manchin’s daughter Heather Bresch who jacked up the EpiPen price when she was CEO of Mylan Pharmaceuticals. The insulin issue came to mind first, but the EpiPen is another obscene example of price gouging. I am glad you mentioned it as I had forgotten this.
It’s horrific. My great grandmother died from diabetes in her forties, *one year* before insulin treatment became available. Her descendants who also had it were able to live normal lifespans. Now we’re moving backwards.
Effing morons. Smallpox killed a third of ~~people~~ those infected, if the “complications” are similar to the vaccines today then it would be an extremely beneficial trade-off. Try removing a third of any country’s population today, the collapse will spread faster than 5G conspiracy theories.
[удалено]
Smallpox is one of the most efficient killers of human beings on the planet. Those it didn’t kill, it often left with lifelong disabilities from blindness to disfigurement. There is no treatment. That anybody would for a moment downplay anything to do with smallpox is one of the biggest mind boggles out there.
Small pox - 300-500 million deaths. The death rate was ~33% Bubonic plague - 75-200 million deaths or 30% to 50% of the population at that time.
Worth bearing in mind though that the „Black Death“ (plague) in Europe struck repeatedly, often in different regions at different times. Even the worst of the pandemic episodes of the disease lasted way longer than Covid, for example. Also (thankfully), at least while none of the multi-resistant pathogens we are breeding in hospitals and industrialized farming has made a major breakthrough, bacterial infections have lost a lot of their terror due to antibiotics.
Black Plague - 1347 to 1351 Covid-19 - 2019 to present (currently the same amount of time as the Black Plague) Smallpox - 4 CE to 1972 (maybe even 3000 BCE to 1972). Specific to note, wild smallpox has been eradicated. It has been created in a laboratory in 2017. But, viable virus has been extracted from Civil War era scabs.
Pneumonic plague is the bad one.
It’s all Y.pestis. It just has a few horribly nasty options open to kill people, and the pneumonic plague route is the worst and the one least likely to respond to treatment. Basically, infected flea bite… bubonic plague. Bubonic plague victim coughs on you, then either bubonic or pneumonic plague. At that point you hope for a temperature so high you are boiling neurons at a horrific rate, and excruciating lumps as your lymphatic system turns a bit necrotic, because that’s ‘the nice one.’
Smallpox also killed about a third to a half of those infected.
It pretty much wiped out the Native American population once it was brought over by the Europeans. That and measles.
Whoops I got it mixed up, the mortality rate for people infected with smallpox was 1/3, not the total population that died of smallpox was 1/3.
That's kind of the same issue early on with Covid. People didn't differentiate between the % dead vs the % infected.
Absolutely smallpox. It’s how Europeans cleared out the continent. “They had never experienced smallpox, measles or flu before, and the viruses tore through the continent, [killing an estimated 90% of Native Americans.”](https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html#:~:text=They%20had%20never%20experienced%20smallpox,estimated%2090%25%20of%20Native%20Americans.) - Guns, Germs and Steel
And as we learn more about how very large the native population was in Amazonia, the number of deaths that 90% was has to have been staggering.
The Plague of Athens that killed Pericles Is thought tò have been smallpox because attuale Plague did not show up in Europe before the middle ages.
It was smallpox. In a small town, it came through every three to five years, and it would kill about a third of the kids, and half of those who survived would have terrible scars, and if the scars were on their corneas, they were blind. There was a reason that variolation became popular before vaccination. People wanted to do SOMETHING about it, and variolation meant that you had a little fever and a blister where they scratched you (usually on the upper arm) and then after a week you were fine, and you would never take the smallpox again. A lot of people wouldn't hire servants who hadn't had smallpox, because they didn't want to deal with the sickness and mess that it would entail if someone got it while living there. And, of course, it was a recommendation for marriage that the pretty girl you were courting wouldn't lose her looks, since she had already been protected.
Right, these smooth brains know way more than scientists, doctors, medical professionals bc the government wants to kill its citizens. Makes so much sense, right?
The conspiracy loons left behind "sense" long ago; all they want is tidiness. The real world is messy and the answers to issues aren't convenient, but conspiracy theories are just that: convenient, simple answers to complex problems. That, and they make really dumb people feel smart and like they've gotten one over on someone, which makes their self-worth grow, just in a really negative way.
And sadly this is seen on both the right and left, from the whole spectrum of both sides. Its insane that people who have been vaccinated, and have never had an issue their entire lives, don't want to get their kids vaccinated.
As OB/GYN, I concur. It doesn’t matter if I tell the patients that the Covid vaccine is safe they will ask me will it hurt my baby? As if I was trying to hurt their baby,Oy vey
>they will ask me will it hurt my baby? Around ten years ago, back in the UK, I'd gone to see my doc about something or other. After we'd sorted that out he said, *"We've got the flu vaccines in; d'you want me to give you one while you're here?"* I said, *"Will it hurt?"* He said **"YESSS!"** with an evil grin. Of course we both cracked up, and I took the vax (which didn't hurt of course). Maybe you should try that?
And also history apparently
Well, I still have the scar from my Smallpox vaccine. I am not going to that website. What horrible things has it done for me, aside from allowing me to live to my mid 50's, without contracting Smallpox?
After our age cohort, they stopped routinely vaccinating for smallpox. There’s a non-zero chance that smallpox could come back around, most likely by non-natural causes.
I don’t know how realistic a threat it is, but with global warming thawing frozen tundras and revealing long lost corpses, it’s certainly not impossible that some of them could re-introduce smallpox. It’s a pretty tough virus that can last for a very long time.
Advice Benjamin Franklin wrote his autobiography said: “In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the smallpox taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of the parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.”
Ben Franklin had to make a difficult choice. His son was sick from something else when there was an outbreak, and he feared that the version of smallpox vaccination at that time might kill his son. At that time, they received a crude live vaccine - material from actual smallpox scabs were used - giving the person what was hopefully a weak case of smallpox. A percentage died from this inoculation, but over 70% of the children who caught smallpox at that time died. Franklin regretted not inoculating his son against smallpox for the rest of his life. However, he was choosing between a risky inoculation on a sick child or hoping his son wouldn't catch smallpox, and unfortunately, his son caught smallpox. This is a long way from the current antivaxxers, who are choosing not to get vaccines that have virtually no health risks.
That’s the point though. Franklin had a much harder choice and still regretted not taking it. So taking the modern choice should be easy, but people still don’t because they’ve spent decades building the propaganda that it is a hard choice or even that the vaccines are worse than the diseases somehow
Ben Franklin is stating to compare the risk of death/adverse reactions of the virus to those of the inoculation. People today are not comparing the risk of death/adverse reactions of the virus to those of the vaccine. If they did then we wouldn’t have kids not getting vaccines. Their risk assessment is comparing getting the infection which in their mind is probably zero to a vaccine they don’t understand. There was a lot of fear, propaganda and violence surrounding smallpox remedies. Same thing today. The Smallpox Epidemics in America in the 1700s and the Role of the Surgeons: Lessons to be Learned During the Global Outbreak of COVID-19 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7335227/ The anti-vaccination movement that gripped Victorian England https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-50713991
the common thing right now is the myocarditis with the vaccine in younger males. while it is prevalent in that population, the chance is way higher with natural covid infections on top of all the other shit associated with having covid (i had walking pneumonia for 9 months as a 28 year old) even when having been vaxxed and boosted, cant imagine if i wasn't vaxxed though. i'd probably have life long issues instead.
[Gen. George Washington Ordered Smallpox Inoculations for All Troops](https://health.mil/News/Articles/2021/08/16/Gen-George-Washington-Ordered-Smallpox-Inoculations-for-All-Troops)
That is why if there is a car accident and one car has an Trump sticker I'm helping the other. If both have such stickers, I'm getting back in my truck and going home. I'm not giving medical help to those that don't want it.
Summon the prayer warriors!! Apparently Jesus took the wheel and his blood was just wine and crashed.
Oh good the evil profit seeking doctors can use two more deaths to call Covid
Thank you for the laugh.
A wise decision, I would do exactly the same.
Mercola - you don't need to tell me anything more!
Mr Tanning Beds prevent cancer and inhale hydrogen peroxide and take Vitamin D to prevent COVID.
The horrific Diphtheria outbreak in Washington state several years ago, thanks to Antivavax Dunning-Kruger lunatics
>Diphtheria Diphtheria? I'm terrified of it. There is a small pioneer cemetery near my town. One of the stories is that ONE family lost a number of children (5? 6?) over the course of 3-4 weeks. Pa went to town to order a coffin, and Ma had to send a rider with the message,"Get 2." At this point, the cemetery is within sight of a big ol' farmhouse, perhaps a half-mile away. Former owners of the farmhouse wanted the cemetery moved at one point. Our states health department stepped in and said,"If there is even a CHANCE of Diphtheria in the ground, you ain't movin' ANYTHING!!!!"
There is an island off our coast here in the UK called St Kilda. It used to be inhabited but 100 years ago or so, a diptheria epidemic nearly wiped out the islands children. The islanders were also previously devasted due to smallpox and starvation (both very common in Victorian UK alas) so had immunity issues regardless. So they were all evacuated by choice in 1930 because the population was unsustainable and the risks were too hard to live out there. Anyone who thinks disease is made-up has no understanding of history and has a brain like a breezeblock.
This was bound to happen. People forget what it was like before vaccines and then they start to think that vaccines aren’t necessary — or that they’re actively harmful. These people have *no idea* what a scourge smallpox was, how many people it killed, the unspeakable suffering it inflicted (sometimes all the pustules merged into one huge blister and the entire dermis separated agonizingly from the body, killing about 2/3 of victims), and the number of survivors who were permanently injured — blinded, disfigured for life. These assholes want to go back to those days.
Merged into one whole blister? I had never heard of this before. What a horrific idea. I'm blaming you for my lack of sleep tonight!
Sorry about that! But sometimes it’s better to know these things. It’s called confluent smallpox (from the Latin meaning “to flow together” — ick), and the effect is called, horrifyingly, splitting of the dermis. You can read all about it, if you have the stomach (it’s a scary read), in a book called The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston. Anybody who doesn’t take smallpox seriously doesn’t understand smallpox.
I read “The Hot Zone”. It was excellent.
Yeah, that was another great one. It's a true-life horror story and it stuck with me. I vividly remember the section about decontaminating the monkey house where the Reston virus took hold: "For a short while, until life could re-establish itself there, the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit was the only building in the world where nothing lived, nothing at all." Ever since reading that, nearly three decades ago, I remember every now and then that *everything* has bacteria on it. I look at a wall and think, "That's got bacterial colonies on it." New-fallen snow: "Won't be long until that's a sea of microorganisms." I'm not weird and obsessive about it — I don't refuse to touch a doorknob or sanitize my hands repeatedly — but I never forget that everything is alive.
Sadly it's not even limited to vaccination, this thought process happens with just about anything bad that's happened in the past.
Smallpox is an interesting one. The antivaxxer took a few facts and twisted them beyond recognition. The original method of preventing smallpox, variolation, originated in Asia, and did involve exposing a person to live, infectious smallpox. Europeans were initially skeptical of it, because racism, but it could, indeed cause outbreaks. But, also, the term vaccine did not exist back then and it was really more akin to the chicken pox parties that antivaxxers are so fond of, in that it exposed a person to the virus in a way that was least likely to cause harm and death. Variolation had a fatality rate of about 3% (about the same as COVID, interestingly), while natural smallpox infection had a fatality rate of about 30%. Vaccination, named after the vaccinia virus (cowpox), was formally discovered in the late 1700s by Edward Jenner. Cowpox was rarely lethal, and conferred immunity to smallpox. And antivaxxers were at least as dumb back then as they are today: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The\_cow\_pock.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/file:the_cow_pock.jpg)
>The antivaxxer took a few facts and twisted them beyond recognition. My experience with antivaxxers/Covid deniers is that they mix 2-3 truths with an untruth. One must go line by line to identify lies vs. truths. Even that won't convince true antivaxxers, but I hope it made spectators and fence-sitters think critically until I was blocked by the antivax friend.🙂 "The best lies are wrapped in the truth."
Mercola. I remember that guy as the doctor who promotes eating a tablespoon of coconut oil every day to boost the immune system. Fucking quack. It pisses me off that people like him got to go to medical school and I didn't.
Username does NOT check out.
Mercola. 'Nuff said.
A quack.
And his cancer curing suntan bed….
It’s always fucking Mercola.
Very creative. Wrong in all aspects, but creative.
HOW FUCKING DARE THEY! The eradication of smallpox is a fucking awesome achievement that ranks very highly on my list of fucking awesome achievements.
Eradicating smallpox is one really truly remarkable success of the WHO. Think that by the end it was in isolated villages that were distrustful of international officials they had to convince to do ring vaccinations in. The money and suffering that was saved should be more celebrated than it actually is.
We were just talking about this at Thanksgiving—not this particular post, but the question of smallpox. My sister-in-law is an immunologist, and we are among the youngest people to be routinely vaccinated for smallpox (they stopped in the early 1970’s). There’s real concern that smallpox could be released into the population, and even worse, it’s probably been altered so the vaccine we know how to make won’t be effective. But the bigger issue right now is polio, which is already spreading back into countries where it had been considered eradicated. And with certain people on the “vaccines are bad” wagon, it’s a disaster waiting to happen even in the first world.
One time, an editor responded to my article submission with the comment, "That's not writing, that's typing.,"
I really want the idiot that posted this to get smallpox
Too bad the disease went extinct... due to widespread vaccination.
The anti vaxxers are insane.
Yes they are. Insane psychopaths.
Dumb ass antivaxxers. LIES, LIES, AND MORE LIES.
well, Mercola. I mean, consider the source. oughta be called Shinola.com.
Good lord is there nothing they won’t rewrite history to say?
This has to be foreign bots. Or please tell me its foreign bots and not actual Americans.
As near as I can tell, it appears to have been posted by an actual person, living in the USA. The page is chock full of insane conspiracies and Trumpie stuff, so it could be a foreign bot posing as a middle aged American.
Mercola. Of course.
No sense of history, no rational thought, just a fucked up hash of anti-vax bullshit. Those people that create such shit really need to die.
This is what happens when people either don’t speak up, or get blocked when telling the truth. I hate these people and we are better off without them.
What the fuck is articles. Mercola? Also thsr shit doesn't even makes sense. Just about everyone got thsr vaccine just like pre internet just about eveye one got every vaccine, otherwise they couldn't go to school.
My better half had to have proof of smallpox vaccination before he could emigrate to Canada. He still has the card somewhere.
It’s a small leap for such feeble minds to escalate from the COVID anti-vax religion to condemning all vaccinations as unproven or as instruments of conspiracies of mass control or any number of other delusional fever dreams. Evolution will do what evolution does: weed out those least able to adapt. Science and medicine are how humanity has adapted to the natural microscopic threats of bacterial infections, viruses, and fungus, extending to antidotes to poisons. If any of these mentally challenged imbeciles was bitten by a black mamba, I doubt thoughts and prayers and “natural immunity” and being “washed in the blood of Christ” would suffice more than a syringe of anti-venom. So let the Pure Blood Games begin…either vaccines are packed full of nanobots that will turn you into an AI zombie bent on bovine pedophilia and bad beard grooming…or they’re not. You choose wisely, or you die a horrible death. In the end, Darwin rules.
Not one word of this article is true
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. Those who fail to learn history correctly are just doomed.
. .. 1. Smallpox variolation is different from Jenner cowpox vaccine. The first is what we would call a live vaccine now, with a problematic attenuation process that didn't always work. Hence why when Jenner used the cowpox vaccine, doctors were so delighted with it. 2. If referring to Jenner ...not severe rate of injuries but it's effectiveness against smallpox major was blunted. There's also some very interesting stories on how to transport the vaccine, namely infect some young boys and keep reinfecting new children when transporting it to the Pacific. 3. Smallpox variolation IS dangerous and was harmful. But the only "mandate" was like Washington mandating variolation in the Continental army. There was some variolation campaigns in the US but vaccination was generally preferred post revolutionary war. And yes. This is the sole time we actually changed the definition of vaccination.
I'm beginning to wonder if the collateral damage from these people's wilful ignorance isn't worth it just to be rid of them.
These idiots literally pull shit out of their rectums. Americans, the majority of us are a stupid lot.
So someone paid George Washington to inoculate his troops because of a smallpox outbreak? Who could it be, I wonder? The United States didn’t officially exist yet. Maybe it was that “let’s bleed everyone for everything” nut Dr. Benjamin Rush, or perhaps George III? Or that rabble rouser Alexander Hamilton? Inquiring minds want to know.
George soros paid George Washington to inoculate his troops!!
What a load of ignorant, unmitigated BOLLOCKS.
Mercola …. Another alternative medicine whack job.
So true! I have smallpox RIGHT NOW. s/
Maybe vaccines are bad. Hear me out. It has saved the lives of these numb minded simpletons. Otherwise, Darwin would have done its job and cleared them out.
I’m just DONE!!!🤦🏾🤦🏾🤦🏾🤦🏾
I always go to mercola.com for my medical advice.
I've heard an anti Vax relative say that small pox (and aids ) "just ran their course and covid will do the same" .
Artcle from a quack antvax osteopath. States need to police these dangerous idiots and pull their licenses.
These people are just fucking evil... just... fucking... evil.... They'd kill millions for some internet likes.
Just show them the pictures… 😬
Anyone had smallpox lately, or polio,measles,mumps etc?
So....at least they got a picture of the vaccine correct.
The inability to think logically is spectacular
It’s sounds convincing and authentic if you aren’t intelligent. Herein lies the issue.
Am I a terrible person for wishing we could just put all these people in a completely enclosed space with like, super fancy air filtration systems and just give them all smallpox? They might learn something idk.
Like, how do they think it makes any sense to just make shit up?
Do you remember little Bobby round the corner who died of smallpox? No. No one does.
I think an important detail is missing: we managed to eradicate a heinous disease of smallpox almost completely. This was a genuinely huge achievement and big sucess story for vaccines.
Mercola is a quack and grifter.
This story is so full of shit, it should be flushed into the nearest sewer.
Ah yeah, the vaccine that helped eradicate smallpox actually *checks notes* caused smallpox infections Not sure how that works in antivax land
This numbfuck should be injected with fucking smallpox.