With a growing number of anti vaxxers on social media, I keep reading this.
Vaccines didn’t cure disease, toilets did!
This claim is completely false, but has become the new excuse for people against the COVID vaccine to act like vaccines never mattered to begin with.
Here’s every reason that it makes absolutely no sense.
1 - The sanitation claim
The claim is an increase in toilets and public sanitation happened during the time vaccines became common and that wiped out these diseases and not vaccines.
The polio vaccine came out in 1955.
Toilets in the US became popular in the 1850s.
The flush toilet called “the crapper” came out in the 1880s.
Over 90% of homes had toilets by 1910 and some regions of the country were 100%.
The claim hygiene wiped out diseases doesn’t make a ton of sense, seeing how sinks, toilets and baths in most homes all existed for over 50 years.
Adding to that, 60% of the world doesn’t have toilets currently.
Africa became polio free for the first time ever in 2020, which was 27 years after the vaccine was introduced there.
As of 2015, 87% of West Africa does not have easy access to toilets and that’s not up much from the 95% 30 years ago.
So Africa wiped out a major disease with vaccines and didn’t have that sanitation boost.
2 - The timeline of vaccines
The polio vaccine came out in 1955.
Measles was 1963
Mumps was 1971
Pneumonia was 1977
Meningitis was 1978
They all came out at different times and all noticed massive decreases/eliminations at different times which began post elimination.
This is a pretty strong case the sanitation argument doesn’t work, because if it did, every disease would have begun falling rapidly at the same time and not different times.
3 - Why not every disease?
This is easily the simplest counter, but I actually think it holds up the best.
Why just the diseases we had vaccines for were eliminated, but everything we haven’t vaccinated for is still around?
If sanitation actually worked, we’d not have the common cole, mono and a lot of other household diseases everyone gets that can be transferred via casual contact.
There was a Brady Bunch episode Bobby kisses a girl on the cheek in the early 70s, she says she might have the mumps and he ends up sleeping in his dog house.
The diseases wiped out with vaccines being transferred via casual contact is something everyone has known for well over a hundred years.
Anti-vaxxers have this desire to reinvent history and make the claim it was only poor sanitation. Obviously not having working toilets could make something like polio spread faster and there was a cut in diseases with toilets becoming more common.
They still existed though.
Final thoughts
The stuff mentioned here is just really basic common sense stuff, but I don’t think anti vaccine people will listen.
Anti vaxxers and conspiracy theorist, I believe have some sort of weird kind of mental fantasy that being stubborn won’t get rid of. They see problems in the world and invent this scenario which they know they won’t fix or improve, but blame it on that.
It’s this weird sort of mentally unhealthy thing and I don’t think any argument can fix them.
But for those who aren’t nuts, I hope you enjoyed this!