Most of the conspiracy theories about vaccines, which seem to drive most of K's thinking and that of others of his ilk, are not based on science or statistics.
In the past, for example, smallpox killed between 1/3 and 1/2 of all who contracted it. At the time most people lived in small villages. Because nearly every American child born before 1971 was vaccinated as part of a national program, with the world following suit, humanity has destroyed smallpox. It took 200 years of incessant human effort. Those now over 55 stood in line for their inoculation at about age ten in schools across the world for decades.
For those too young to remember, "Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by variola virus, which belongs to the genus Orthopoxvirus. The last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977, and the World Health Organization certified the global eradication of the disease in 1980, making smallpox the only human disease to have been eradicated to date." (Wikipedia)
How bad was it? Donald Henderson — who directed the WHO’s program to eradicate smallpox worldwide — reports that during the 20th century alone, "an estimated 300 million people died of the disease" in his review paper “The eradication of smallpox — An overview of the past, present, and future.”
The estimated population of the world in 1960 was 3,015,470,894. If we use that as the est. average population of the century, then the death rate from smallpox was about one percent. Applying the historic death rate to the current world population, a pandemic in an unvaccinated world (the RFKJ model) would see four billion deaths from smallpox and an unknowable number from the strep and staph infections that would accompany the impossibility of burying the dead.
The virus is still out there, lurking in dark places and in sample vials in labs in Russia and the US. It could be unleashed by an accident or a madman, and as a Russian scientist told a conference in 1982 (UPI) about nuclear war, "the living will envy the dead."
Scores of other less virulent diseases are on their way to oblivion, and we're on the cusp of being able to develop preventive measures, as shown by the Covid19 experience, in short order.
The downside, which is real, is the possibility that in any effort to eradicate a disease, a minority of the population will instead find the cure worse than (the absence of) the disease. The statistical probabilities as well as historic experience, however, are clearly in favor of the vaccination concept, and like it or not, the preservation of society, not of the individual, must be the focus of government.
You might want to write your senator about this and other pending appointments.
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