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There is a big problem with vaccines and we need to talk about it. This is a graph of measles cases in the United States alone. You can see before the vaccine was introduced, reported cases were sometimes as high as 900,000 in one year. Keep in mind these are reported cases and the actual case numbers were estimated around 3 to 4 million per year. More than 50% of people had measles before the age of six and more than 90% before the age of 15 with epidemic cycles happening every 2 to 3 years. Then in 1963 when measles vaccines were first licensed, rates dropped 95%. Now most people who die from the measles are under 5 years old with a 10% mortality rate for people who are malnourished. And before the vaccine
about 2.6 million people died per year from the measles. But even without death, the measles virus causes a painful, miserable sickness that can have long lasting effects. It can cause you to have a long-term weakened immune system. It can cause deafness, blindness, and even brain damage. Now, you can see in the same graph a rebound in these cases starting around 2008 thanks to vaccine hesitancy. But regardless of your politics or stance, we're here to break down the exact problem because there actually is an issue with vaccines. They work too well. That's not a joke or an overstatement. If you're someone who is skeptical, please give us a chance to highlight the data. A majority of people alive today in the Western world at least are so far
removed from the diseases that vaccines have kept in check or eliminated completely that they don't even think these diseases matter or exist. If you were alive in the early to mid 1900s, you would be seeing how damaging and awful this virus can be. Knowing millions were dying every year and would have weighed up some possible minor risks or symptoms from giving your kids vaccines against the unimpeachable evidence that they prevent something much worse. It's why so many people were willing to take it. And that is just one virus. Here's a graph of polio cases since the 1980s. In 1988, a coordinated eradication and vaccination initiative was started worldwide, taking cases from around 350,000 a year and dropping them 99%. Before the
vaccine was available in the US, 13,000 to 20,000 cases of paralytic polio were reported each year. This meant thousands of children had to use braces, crutches, wheelchairs, and ventilators to breathe. And one in every 200 infections of polio leads to irreversible paralysis. Among those paralyzed, 5 to 10% die when their breathing muscles become immobilized. From 1964 to 65, before the reubella vaccine, there were 2,100 neonatal deaths and 11,250 miscarriages. And of the 20,000 born with reubella, more than half ended up deaf, over 3,000 blind and 1,800 with mental delays. And even bacterial infections like tetanus show similar results. In 1990, around 350,000 deaths occurred worldwide. By 2013, this was
down to 59,000. In the US, while not a major concern currently, nearly all cases occur in unimmunized individuals. MS cases, another virus causing serious illness, had a vaccine developed in 1967 and saw cases drop by 99%. Again, seeing a rise in the 2000s thanks to vaccine hesitancy. Hepatitis B is a cancer-causing virus that wasn't discovered until 1966, with around 15% of the population being chronically infected in some regions. Once its genome was finally sequenced in the 1980s, development of vaccines began with current effectiveness rates of 95% seeing those numbers drop drastically in the US. At this point, I hope you're getting the picture, but let me give you one more massive example. Smallox, the
only human disease to be considered completely eradicated. The final known case was in 1978, but before that, it was estimated that it was the cause of hundreds of millions of deaths in human history. That's not an exaggeration. 300 million people died of smallox in the 20th century alone. It's extremely contagious and has a 30% mortality rate with some strains having up to a 100% mortality rate. That means a near certainty of death if you contract those strains of the virus. Now, the smallox vaccine is often considered the gold standard vaccine, which inspired so many other eradication campaigns. Altogether, studies estimate that between 1974 to 2024, 93.7 million lives were saved from
measles, 27.9 million from tetanus, 13.2 million from ptasus, 10.9 million from tuberculosis, and 3.8 million saved from other diseases. And those numbers don't even include the hundreds of millions more who were spared severe illness and long-term effects. A form of inoculation was even used in 1500s China to prevent smallox which was later adopted by Europe in the 18th century. Instead of a vaccine, they would expose people to a material from an infected person in the hopes that they would build an immune response and it worked. While 1 to 2% of the people who were exposed or varated would die, this was a much better option than the 30% of people who would die when exposed to the smallox virus
naturally. Of course, today we're not using the same process of varilation. We use modern-day vaccines which are much more safe and way more effective. Vaccines typically introduce a weakened form of the germ to your body so that the immune system can learn to recognize it. Your body then builds its defenses so it is prepared to fight off a real attack later. These are known as live attenuated vaccines like measles, mumps and reubella which are very effective but can't be given to people with compromised immune systems. Inactive vaccines like polio or hepatitis A use dead pathogens that have been killed by
heat or chemicals. These can be used on people with already weakened immune systems. However, they aren't great for longlasting immunity because they don't stimulate the real thing quite as well as live attenuated vaccines and often require several doses. Subunit vaccines like hepatitis B or influenza use a specific protein or carbohydrate from the pathogen that will still trigger an immune response. And of course, mRNA vaccines were made most famous because of CO 19 and have a really ingenious mechanism of action. In a regular cell of your body, you have DNA inside of the nucleus. And this DNA stores all the information and instructions important to the functioning of your cells, your
body, and ultimately makes you. Inside your cell is machinery that reads through your DNA and transcribes it into mRNA which then leaves the nucleus and goes into your cytoplasm. And it's here that the ribosomes in your cells read the RNA and depending on the specific code build a series of amino acids which fold in on themselves to make proteins which keep you alive and functioning. This process is known as translation. In fact, this is the process that viruses take advantage of anyway. They insert their genetic information into you and then your cell machinery uses that information to then build more viruses
within your body. The mRNA that is being injected into you from the vaccine also carries genetic instructions. But in this case, it's only coding for one small part of the virus instead of the whole thing. You've probably seen SARS COV2 represented like this with spikes on it. And it's the spike protein, which on its own is harmless, that the vaccines's mRNA codes for. The mRNA makes its way into the cytoplasm of your cells where the ribosomes read the information and start to create the spike proteins. Once the protein is made, it goes to the cell membrane and then your cell breaks down and destroys the injected mRNA instructions.
Suddenly, your antibodies will notice it and go, "Well, this doesn't belong here." Which triggers an immune response to recognize and prepare your body for the real thing without you ever having to come in contact with the actual virus. Now, some people might be saying, "Good for you. Go get the vaccine. And this is a totally personal matter or it's between a parent and their child. But just remember that you getting vaccinated helps other people and society. If you're not sick, you can't spread the disease to those with weaker immune systems, particularly the very young or elderly and those who may have medical conditions in which they can't be vaccinated. For example, those
undergoing chemotherapy. The more people that are vaccinated, the less available real estate there are for germs. Meaning its spreading ability is squashed. This principle is called herd immunity. For the vulnerable in our society, herd immunity is their best protection. Of course, we should always be skeptical of a trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry, but we also have to understand that we're dealing with hundreds of years of data on how vaccines work. It's true, drugs have been pulled from the market after harmful side effects came to light. However, vaccines are among the most highly regulated substances we can put into our bodies in part because they are given to healthy people,
usually children, as a preventative measure rather than a treatment. They go through multiple phases of testing to see if they are safe, to find the correct dose, and to see if protection against the disease actually works. In Canada and the US, it can take 10 to 25 years of testing before a vaccine is approved. And once on the market, there's continuous monitoring of its effects. At the end of the day, when we look at our history, there's no doubt that vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives and kept many more healthy. And while of course, we should always be pushing for further testing, safety regulations, making sure the side effects of vaccines are as minimal as
possible, I think it's important to stop and recognize that so many of us are so lucky to have grown up in an age where we don't even really know what these diseases look like or how they can impact society. And that is truly thanks to vaccines and modern science. Let's not bring those terrible diseases back. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you ASAP for some more science.
