How Many People in the U.S. Died of Measles Each Year Before the First Measles Vaccine?
Your bite-size dose of immunity against vaccine misinformation. Spread the truth.
Approximately how many people in the United States died of measles per year in the years before the first measles vaccine was available in 1963?
a) 1 in 45 people died of measles
b) 1 in 4,500 people died of measles
c) 1 in 450,000 people died of measles
(Answer below. Paywall will be removed in nine days!)
The answer is 1 in 450,000 people died of measles. According to the CDC, there were around 400 deaths per year in the few years leading up to the first measles vaccine in the United States in 1963. Since the United States population in those years was approximately 180,000,000, that means around 1 in 450,000 Americans died of measles in the years prior to the measles vaccine being introduced.
If you thought millions, tens of thousands or even thousands died a year in the United States, ask yourself why you had that belief (more on that later).
I remember taking our children to measles, mumps, and chicken pox "parties". We wanted them to be exposed to other kids who had them, get the viruses, and get over them in their youth, when it would not be too painful, and because it would give them lifetime immunity. Getting these as adults is much more painful and a greater threat to life. We never vaccinated our children against those illnesses.
Love you Aaron. But you can't take the yearly death count (around 400 per year) and use the entire US population. Yes, technically that is how many people died per year of measles at a population level. But the more honest number is to use the proportion of children who got measles every year. So you could obtain a more reliable IFR (infection fatality rate) since that's what most people care about. I'm not sure where to obtain the true number of measles cases every year (not the "reported number"). At the very least, you should use the population of children at that time (0-18 years), since by the time they reached adulthood, almost every person was immune to measles. CDC now says the risk of death is 1/1000 based on more recent outbreaks. However, those outbreaks included a fairly high number of adults, who likely had imperfect & waning vaccine-induced immunity (and not life-long post-infectious immunity). So that is where the 1/1000 number comes from. Personally, I do think measles is serious issue now--not for kids but for all the adults who have waning vaccine-induced immunity. Measles in an adult is a big deal and many more people are at risk b/c of imperfect vaccine-induced immunity. A situation set up by the very people whose purported aim was to protect us from infectious illness. Anyhoo, I think you should revisit your numbers in this article. It doesn't help our cause to minimize.