Infant Mortality Rates, 1963 to 2021, England & Wales
The improvement in mortality has not been constant.
The infant mortality rate in England & Wales has been falling for over a century as you would expect (or certainly hope), given the obvious improvements in sanitation, healthcare, etc.
However, it has not been “plain sailing”. In fact, there are some very obvious upward inflection points (exogenous events causing mortality), most notably in 1968, 1985 and since the early 1990s.
Here are the infant mortality rate (up to 1 year old) charts for boys and girls since 1963, overlaid with the years of the relevant infant vaccination schedules which are supposed to have contributed to the decline in mortality rates. If these interventions were necessary, safe and effective, we should observe fairly obvious downward deviations from the trend line.
The black dotted line is the actual mortality rate. The solid black line is the data points used to fit a simply, 2-order polynomial, in order to vaguely estimate the mortality trend.
And here is the current schedule:
I haven’t been able to find any investigations into the upward spikes in mortality so I have made a note to study this in more detail once I get the full dataset from the ONS, going back to 1900. Well, someone has to, don’t they?
I think it was Prof Angus Dalgleish the other day who said that any vaccine that needs 3 shots clearly doesn't work!
I don't know about everyone else here but I used to believe that vaccines against the big killer diseases were brilliant but now I am full of doubt. My mother used to talk of whole families being taken away in the middle of the night with diptheria (in the 1930s) and I read once how you die in a terrible way from it. So a vaccine to prevent it seemed an excellent thing. Likewise, I knew people at school with calipers because of polio. I read enough Victorian novels to know how dreadful TB was.
So vaccines seemed amazing, sensible, life-saving things. And now I just don't know. When my kids were babies I had arguments with doctors because I refused jabs that were for the non-killers. I figured you need a few illnesses so as to build up your immune system and my kids were fit and healthy.
But now I question all of it. Are we just the lucky ones who had vaccinations without side effects? Where did those old diseases go if the vaccines didn't work - it can't all be down to clean water and more food can it? Or can it?
You may have heard about the Ottawa policewoman who started investigating the dramatic increase in SIDS deaths by asking the mothers about whether mother or baby had recently gotten shots. She got suspended for even asking.