Not Just Measles: The Other Vaccines Developed After The Disease Already Disappeared
A previous story on Investigative Economics detailed how deaths due to measles had largely disappeared by 1961 when the measles vaccine was developed and authorized, so ascribing the disappearance of measles to the vaccine is specious at best.
But there is a possibility that numerous other vaccines developed in the mid-20th century also fall to the same logic; they were developed after their respective diseases disappeared or were already in sharp decline because of improvements in rising standards of living, diet, sanitation, and hygiene in the first half of the 20th century.
In 1977, John and Sonja McKinlay, an epidemiologist and a statistician respectively that would eventually head the New England Research Institutes, published The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century in the peer-reviewed health care policy journal Milbank Quarterly, which called into question the efficacy of certain vaccines and excessive healthcare spending in the 20th century.
The McKinlays were heavily influenced by the work of physician and historian Thomas McKeown, who argued in books like The Origins of Human Disease, that tuberculosis largely disappeared in the U.K. before the introduction of the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine and streptomycin—one of the first antibiotics. The theory that declines in mortality came largely from improvements in health and sanitation is called the McKeown thesis.
The McKinlays expanded on McKeown’s theory to statistically detail how not just tuberculosis and measles but scarlet fever, typhoid, pneumonia, influenza, whooping cough, diptheria, and poliomyelitis, or polio, all saw major declines unrelated to new vaccines and treatments.
The success of the smallpox vaccine is well-established; the change in the age- and sex-adjusted death rate (SDR) for the disease following the development of the smallpox vaccine is a full 100 percent. But other diseases didn’t even see a one percent change after their treatment was developed.
For typhoid, the antibiotic chloramphenicol would only lead to a .29 percent change in SDR. For measles, it was 1.38 percent. For tuberculosis, it was .17 percent. While penicillin is considered a breakthrough antibiotic, it likely did not contribute to the decline in scarlet fever, which only saw a 1.75 percent decline since it was developed.
Others saw more significant declines after the treatment was introduced, yet still more than 50 percent of the decline came before any vaccine was available. Like polio, whose vaccine was supposedly greeted with a “contagion of love” that swept the world in 1955. But the death rate for the disease had already been halved by that year, and the total decline in SDR since the vaccine was released would only be 25 percent.
A recent New York Times story noted that Robert F. Kennedy’s lawyer, Aaron Siri, petitioned the Food & Drug Administration to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine along with 13 other vaccines, although not related to their efficacy but the side effects of their ingredients like aluminum.
