Even that graph shows that polio was well on the way down prior to the vaccine.
After the case rate had increased by 1200% from 1942 to 1952 I would expect some decline. I am not sure what you are trying to show. Is it that without the vaccine polio would have naturally run its course in the world. Something like the black plague.
The mid 14th century Black Death killed 1 in 3 Europeans. The highest number of polio deaths in US was around 3000 (1 in 50,000) in 1952. Not even in the same ballpark. If polio was already in decline, what caused the decline?
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Most viruses will mutate into less deadly pathogens over time.
The main reason is because if they kill the host too quickly, they would not be able to replicate (their only real biological function)
So the real question is not how many people died, but how many people were exposed and were damaged by the virus.
The exact same thing happened with Covid. It mutated into a less deadly form, but it then hit many more people leading to a rise in morbidity vs mortality.
Black death wasn’t caused by a virus.
Bubonic plague was caused by a bacterium.
I was responding to academic Actuary saying that polio was like the “black plague”. I didn’t make the comparison.
Fair enough.
We’ve obviously made improvements in things like sewage treatment and general sanitation in the last 100 years. I don’t think we would go back to a 1900s disease burden if vaccines were eliminated, but also, we have more people now and don’t really know what might happen.
In 1980 500,000 children were paralyzed worldwide with polio. In 2023 it was less than 100. I would say vaccinations had something to do with it.
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That’s a good point… medicine/ iron lung would have lowered the death rate. We focus too much on death as the only outcome. That is the go to for vaccine opponents. See covid.
I’m not sure that’s accurate. Pathogens may become less deadly over time as people gain exposure to it and can mount more of an immune response to it. For particularly deadly, fast spreading pathogens, the people who are most susceptible to them die off, leaving a population that is more robust to the pathogen. The pathogen isn’t so much changing as the susceptible population.
:whynotboth:
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I believe the improvement in sanitation lowered case rates even before the vaccine. But given the amount of fecal coliform alerts across the US even today and the severity of polio the vaccine was not unnecessary.
No doubt sanitation is improving all the time, but I thought that most of the sanitation improvements were in the 19th century and early 20th century.
Actually, I might be wrong. Hand washing didn’t become common until the 1960s (although surgeons did it in the 1870s).
Oh, you mean specifically in the time range of the large decrease in polio cases? Can’t say for sure (also, there was a lot of improvement in the US post Clean Water act in 1972), but anecdotally, people modified their behavior (swimming pools, e.g.) during that time out of fear of polio.
Reading Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. Second Foundation, character Arcadia Darrell quotes Salvor Hardin “Well, he used to say that only a lie that wasn’t ashamed of itself could possibly succeed.” And here we are.
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After doing some more research, I found that the article I linked to has been debunked, so I was fooled (I’ve deleted the link).
There was a flurry of activity in the 90s and early 00s purporting a link between hiv and the polio virus, including an article in rolling stone magazine. It blamed a trial polio vaccine rollout in the Congo in the 1950s on the origins of HIV (also thought to come from the Congo). Although there are similarities between hiv and the virus in the monkeys used to grow the vaccine, they are not the same and subsequent dna research indicates that hiv has been present in humans since the 1930s.
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But, but, it was on the internet!
I mean, I saw that and immediately thought: “source?”
Then, when the “source” was published, I’d check that source out to see if they were legitimate or if their name was used illegitimately.
No, that’s not it. I had a good friend who passed away that was really into this vaccine sceptic stuff. He was a bright guy but did like to be contrary. Of course, he probably used the Internet.
This usually happens when people don’t have a solid grounding in medical knowledge.
My brother has a Ph. D in theoretical phyiscs but has effectively zero medical knowledge.
And he is also a vaccine skeptic because he looks stuff up online.
Its a blind spot quite a lot of people have.
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