By Dawn Babcock Pipple
Before the MMR vaccine, measles was at epidemic proportions. Before the vaccine, the US had 3-4 million cases of measles! That’s insane! Thank goodness for vaccines.
The end.
Aw, now you didn’t think I’d let vaccines get off THAT easy did you?
Prior to the vaccine, 3-4 million cases of measles occured in the United States each year. <—True.
Also true, however, is that of those 3-4 million cases, only about 450 people died each year from it in the years before the vaccine.
That still seems like a lot? Instead of running out to make sure your vaccinations are up to date, how about a shot of perspective instead?
In the screen shot below, I have figured out the percentage of people who died from measles of all of the measles cases back then. 0.015%. Suddenly, measles seems a little less scary doesn’t it? The CDC claims that around 1 or 2 out of a thousand people who get measles will die from measles. Their math doesn’t add up though. I guess they use the term “about” lightly.
Also, consider that in 1963, the population was 189,241,798. That means that prior to the vaccine, the percentage of the entire US population that died from measles was .000237%. (Remember this figure, because it will be important in about two paragraphs.)
Now, if you read the little excerpt above, you might be scared, because even with vaccines, the global death count for children from measles is 197,000 in the stats above! That’s a scare tactic and it makes me mad. First of all, it wasn’t 197,000 children. It was 197,000 people and some of them were children.
Then the excerpt above goes on to talk about present day figures. There are over 6 billion people on the planet. That’s shown as 6,000,000,000 numerically. Correct me if you disagree, but when over 150,000 people die each day total, is 540 people dying of measles each day really that outrageous? They’re counting on us not comprehending the vast population of our global society. 240,000 children in low income countries alone die each year of neonatal infection. 1.26 million people die each year from diabetes and yet they’re still pushing the high fructose corn syrup in school lunches.
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