djsumdogI know plenty of people who had shingles before the chicken vaccine. That's not what I was saying. What I was saying is that children who get the vaccine are much more likely to have shingles than those who don't.
Variola major smallpox had a case fatality rate of 30%.
So the biggest problem with this statement, viruses weren't discovered until the 1890s. The first DNA wasn't sequences until 1970! Sequencing for viruses came much later.
If you look historically, there were some diseases that were small/minor, some that were great. Poxes were a whole host of illnesses that left sores. We retroactively go back and assign this as "Bubonic plague" and that as a "grand pox" or smaller pox. Every type of skin infection imaginable was leprosy. Most diseases were thought to come from bad air, sin, God, the gods, etc.
We have NO IDEA what the case fatality rate of "Variola major smallpox" was because we have no idea what diseases affected what places. There are tons of medical journals from the 1700s and 1800s that argue if small box, measles and chicken pox are manifestations of the same disease or not. People retroactively guess the "real' viruses from the drawn pictures.
Medicine is guesswork mythology. No one has any idea what was in Jenner's inoculations which he grew in cow flesh and injected into people. People took it because everyone was dying and it was just a part of the way things were back then. The actual "vaccine" is lost forever to time.
But on the whole, vaccines are a bloody good thing
That's literally a statement of faith. It might be true. I don't think it is. My my belief is a statement of faith as well. Neither of us can really know.
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