In the early 1800s, some people rejected the smallpox vaccine because they didn’t trust the doctors and scientists promoting them, or because they saw vaccines as an affront to God’s will, or because they worried about dangers they’d heard or witnessed. That the early version of the vaccine occasionally spread infection only heightened those fears. … Those ideas persist today. Popular influencers are calling diseases like measles and mumps “no big deal.”…
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[F]or people who’ve never seen them, the worst manifestations of some of these preventable diseases are almost unimaginable. It’s worth remembering their toll.
- [A] smallpox outbreak could kill up to 30 percent of people infected. Survivors were often left pock-marked and blind.
- [D]iphtheria bacteria churn out a toxin that can cause paralysis, but in 19th-century epidemics, sick children often died of suffocation first. In the deadliest outbreaks, 30 percent to 50 percent of infected children perished.
- [M]easles could kill up to a quarter of people [in unexposed populations]. In previously exposed populations, it could still kill 20 percent of children
- [M]umps led to huge and painful swelling of the salivary glands, which could spread to the brain and leave a child deaf.
- [R]ubella infections resulted in many miscarriages and stillbirths. … In very rare cases, children developed neurological deficits, leaving them with chronic seizures and physical and intellectual disabilities.
