You want to believe things are worse in America, I can't change your mind. In my own lifetime things have gotten visibly better. My father lived into his 90s, and he'd recount how things have gotten quite a bit better. Sure that's anecdotal, but you can look up statistics, too.
A "bunch of neat stuff" does improve standard of living. I'm almost never bored, for example.
Polio is a disease that that's causing immediate suffering and lost potential. And it was even more so before discovery of the vaccine, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
The problem is that there's infinite ways that someone having a disease like polio could change their actions and therefore the future, and not all outcomes are actually worse. Perhaps having polio makes some people into jerks, and for others it somehow makes them better. Perhaps having polio effectively neutralizes some people who would have caused great harm if they had stayed healthy. Imagine if Hitler had contracted polio and was stuck in an iron lung for most of his life: history would be very different. Perhaps one of the people who did get stuck in an iron lung would have been another Hitler. The possibilities are endless.
"Danger" has other dimensions than mortality. Some of polio's worst effects emerge a decade or more after infection for example. The confidence of these assertions about the effects on children are not warranted at all. I'm grateful they don't die at the same rates but that's not an indication it doesn't affect them.
Polio crippled a ton of people that survived it. FDR, as well as one of my great-grandfathers, was in a wheelchair because of it.
(I know some people have speculated that covid may have a lasting impact too, but nothing I've read suggests it's anything like what polio was. Post-polio syndrome effected somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-50% of polio survivors in the old data, 80+% in more modern data.)
Polio was absolutely terrible for those who had it. I wouldn’t blame him for having it. Or for ending it. However, for other reasons, I agree with you.
> since [1988] the number of annual [Polio] cases has dropped by 99.9%, from 350/year to a handful
And what's more, that's not even the impressive part of the curve in terms of magnitude. Polio was once so commonplace that the idea of being anti-vax would have been completely absurd to everyone just some 40/50 years ago, when you had someone crippled by childhood paralysis (of which Polio is the most common cause) living in basically every city block. And even in the White House, from 1933 to 1945.
> They didn't have to worry about dying from measles or being crippled with polio, and medical outcomes are much better nowadays across the board.
Funny you should mention, measles is back, and worldwide fatalities is on the rise. And are you suggesting that US healthcare has improved in the last couple decades? Antivax efforts have made the possibility of a return of endemic polio possible since folks travel, and it's not extinct. Measles was on its way to extinction in the 1990s, but after Wakefield's fraudulent study and the partisan politicization of disease, a host of diseases we never had to worry about anymore are popping back up again. As child vaccination rates continue to drop, we will see it all again.
The adults by and large have all been vaccinated. The kids however are being treated like guinea pigs in an ideological experiment where the losers are the kids themselves.
And as a child of the 70s and 80s, yes, I personally remember the ever-present threat of nuclear war growing up. I also remember the teen suicide rate being abnormally high due to it. Kinda like the rise we see today. It takes its toll, and doesn't at all mean they're "soft".
> This chart [2] (if accurate) is pretty eye opening.
It might be important to note that that chart specifically tracks deaths, not incidence.
At least according to the US CDC [0], paralytic polio (which I think most people think of when they see the word "polio") is generally the type that kills, usually due to paralysis of respiratory muscles and related symptoms.
Given all that, it turns out that the first iron lung that saw widespread use was developed in... 1928! (And other versions had been developed before that) [1] And iron lungs are fantastic for preventing death due to paralysis of respiratory muscles, as the lung does the muscles' job. This could either be until the patient recovers or permanent.
So in short, it's entirely possible the death rate fell because new tech allowed doctors to get better at keeping patients alive, rather than reducing the incidence, as the vaccines were generally intended to do.
> I've also read that the primary contributing factor to the decline (and recent rise) in polio is sanitary conditions.
At least according to the CDC, it's a mixed bag:
> In the immediate prevaccine era, during the first half of the 20th century, improved sanitation resulted in less frequent exposure and increased the age of primary infection, resulting in large epidemics with high numbers of deaths.
Can't really say much on the other claims or the paper, since that'd take way more expertise and/or time than I currently have.
ok, but the observation I was referring to was talking about those children, and how they tended do to much better when exposed to polio; maybe that's a complete fabrication, I don't have a reference on hand
You want to believe things are worse in America, I can't change your mind. In my own lifetime things have gotten visibly better. My father lived into his 90s, and he'd recount how things have gotten quite a bit better. Sure that's anecdotal, but you can look up statistics, too.
A "bunch of neat stuff" does improve standard of living. I'm almost never bored, for example.
reply