Measles Deaths Disappeared Before the Vaccine

Measles, or rubeola, is a highly contagious disease that causes fevers and spots and was associated with 5,087 deaths in the U.S. in 1907. A 1954 outbreak in Boston led researchers to isolate the disease, culture it, and eventually develop a vaccine that would be authorized in 1961 and widely distributed in the U.S. in 1963.

According to a 2003 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) paper on vaccine mandates and their success, Vaccination Mandates: The Public Health Imperative and Individual Rights, the annual 20th century morbidity for measles went from 503,282 to 81 by the year 2000—a 99.8 percent decrease.

The implication is that the introduction and widespread use of the measles vaccine led to that decline in morbidity.

But deaths due to measles were in sharp decline years before a potential vaccine was discovered and certainly before it was widely distributed. In 1910, there were 12 deaths per 100,000 in the U.S. By 1959 it was .2 with only a total of 300 deaths according to a U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare vital statistics report.

Mumps and Rubella

The measles vaccine is regularly given as part of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine—three vaccines that were all developed in 1960s and combined into the MMR vaccine in 1971.

While the other two diseases were relatively common—a 1954 U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare report lists 241,278 incidents of mumps and 36,215 of rubella, or German measles—they are rarely mentioned in mortality reports as a cause of death. The 1959 mortality report doesn’t mention the word mumps or rubella at all.

But the 2003 CDC report states that 152,209 people die from mumps annually in the 20th century and 47,745 from rubella.

The 1959 report lists numerous other diseases with a lower mortality than that—e.g. 280 for whooping cough, 60 for diphtheria. So if thousands were dying from mumps in a year, ostensibly it would be listed.

Other Causes of Morbidity Decline

The World Health organization website details that general health improvements like better nutrition and the availability of antibiotics to help treat complications have likely helped the decline in measles deaths.

In general many diseases saw sharp declines around the early 20th century alongside improvements in quality of life, sanitation, and medicines. For example, the discovery of penicillin in 1928 and its development into an antibiotic treatment in 1939 would help treat a whole host of diseases, like syphilis, which effectively disappeared since the advent of penicillin.