Death Rates Collapsed
Before Vaccines Arrived!
Thanks to better sanitation and rising living standards, death rates for virtually every major disease of the 20th century—measles, diphtheria, pertussis, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, and more—had already fallen by 90–100% before their respective vaccines were introduced.
Some of these diseases never had a vaccine at all.
In other words, vaccines can’t take credit for improvements that already happened.
Measles
Diphtheria
Pertussis (whooping cough)
Tuberculosis
Scarlet fever
The same pattern appears wherever we have data—not just in the U.S., but also in England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, France, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand.
The idea that vaccines “saved millions of lives” in the U.S. falls apart once you look at the actual death counts. The table below shows deaths in the year before each vaccine was licensed. Numbers were already small and trending lower. There simply weren’t millions of lives left to save.
Moving the goalposts
Faced with the reality that vaccines don’t live up to the hype, vaccine zealots will move the goalposts.
Okay, fine—death rates were already dropping before vaccines… but look at the number of cases!
Don’t let incidence numbers fool you
Given that vaccines were clearly not responsible for the massive declines in mortality, defenders pivot to case counts or morbidity as evidence of vaccine success. Yet historical case reporting was inconsistent at best. Deaths, by contrast, are concrete events, legally recorded, and therefore far more reliable.
But even if we take incidence numbers at face value, the metric becomes largely meaningless once mortality has already collapsed. By the 1960s, measles deaths had fallen by 99% without a vaccine, and severe polio cases were rare long before mass vaccination.
The diagnostic shell game
Disease definitions often change after a vaccine’s introduction, creating the illusion that the vaccine eliminated the disease—when in reality, only the diagnostic criteria shifted.
Consider polio. Before the vaccine, temporary muscle weakness sufficed for a polio diagnosis. After the introduction of the vaccine in 1955, only cases with paralysis lasting 60+ days counted. Those cases that would have previously been called polio got relabeled as viral meningitis, transverse myelitis, Guillain-Barré, and more.
Conclusion
Death rates for virtually every major disease fell nearly 100% before their respective vaccines existed. Vaccines didn’t cause the decline—they arrived after it had already happened and then claimed the credit.
Proponents try to distract from this reality by pointing to falling case counts as proof vaccines “worked”, but these drops usually reflect narrower diagnostic criteria, not a genuine reduction in illness. Once a vaccine exists, doctors are far less likely to diagnose a vaccinated patient with the very disease the shot was meant to prevent, so they typically call it something else.
Bottom line:
Death rates fell before the shots even existed.
The rest is marketing.
