Yesterday, I exposed how the New York Times tries to deceive its readers into believing that the decline in infectious disease mortality that occurred in the twentieth century was caused by vaccines.
Citing a review of vital statistics in the journal Pediatrics, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. informed a Senate committee on April 22 that the dramatic decline in measles and other disease mortality was mostly due to factors related to an increasing standard of living.
The author of the Times article, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, vainly tried to deny the truth of what Kennedy said and falsely accused him of mischaracterizing the study while herself doing precisely that. Talk about hypocrisy!
Kennedy is right. It is an incontrovertible point of fact from the historical data that vaccines couldn’t possibly have driven the decline in infectious disease mortality.
I provided an extensive quote from the Pediatrics paper showing in context how it does affirm that “90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality among US children occurred before 1940, when few antibiotics or vaccines were available.”
In addition to graphs for diphtheria and pertussis, I presented the following graph of the data on measles mortality that absolutely destroys the Times’ propaganda narrative:
Here, I’d like to delve a bit deeper into the historical data, with a particular focus on the polio vaccine.
Vaccines Didn’t Save Us
In 1977, the Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly: Health and Society published a paper by John B. McKinlay and Sonja M. McKinlay titled “The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century”.
In it, they focused on vaccinations and argued that, contrary to official dogma, most of the decline in infectious disease mortality had nothing to do with vaccines—an argument considered heretical at the time.