A speaker argues childhood vaccines weren't tested against inert placebos and that disease mortality was already declining before vaccines arrived. He uses chickenpox as an example and calls for more open discussion about vaccine safety.
Most of the vaccines, especially the ones that we give to kids, were never studied against an inert placebo. A lot of times people just want a headline or they want to throw one piece of information without the whole story. And the reality is that there's a lot more to disease reduction and death reduction from these infectious diseases than just vaccines. And most of the diseases had almost no death by the time the vaccines came out. But there certainly were still a lot of infections, and the vaccines really dropped. And I think the perfect example, the easiest example for us to really think about is chickenpox. Because for most of us, if you're an adult, we come from the age where there wasn't a chickenpox vaccine when we were very young, or it just had come out and everybody got chickenpox. We had chickenpox parties. It wasn't a big deal. It's a medical product, and we have to be able to have these kinds of conversations that are open and honest not to get people to do anything, but to open up the discussion so we can make them as safe as possible.
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