"Go to an old cemetery. See all the baby graves from before the 1950s & 60s? After that, hardly any. That's when people started vaccinating their children against deadly childhood diseases. If you're unsure what to do to protect your kids, the answer is literally written in stone." — Michael Okuda
Not just the rows and rows of baby headstones, but the necessity of state care for people who technically survived those diseases but were damaged. Sequelae like encephalitis are often forgotten now.
A simple argument that our "free" press could easily and quickly make - BUT DO NOT - clearly signalling their servitude to the Fascist overlords (too dramatic? - corporate puppets?)
when the polio vaccine was in clinical trials they were turning away volunteers because there were too many. Parents who had seen the nightmare of polio wanted *any* thread of hope that their children might not have to go through it!
And now a local cemetery has brought back the "Children's Garden" concept, because of antivaxxers. Heartbreaking and maddening.
The ground is bloody, search about the churchyard.
I saw one family gravestone with three names in a year. All children. Then (same family) another one the year after, and another one the year after that. Brutal.
I've also seen a grave stone out east from the late 1700s & early 1800s. Family had 15+ kids between a few days & 21 years buried in the same plot over about an 8 year span.
When I was growing up (mostly the 70s), there were adults in the community (some of dad's coworkers, a couple teachers) who were polio survivors. I was in college before I met someone around my age who'd had polio.
Most every old cemetery around here has loads of little markers from the 40s-50s with sheep on them for tiny children, many marked with "Baby [Family Name]." Some older ones have many children on one marker like this one from the Fowler Ground in the Trapps Hamlet. Photo from Abandoned NYC.
