A few days ago, you published a letter in which the author refuted an earlier letter that pointed out that most anti-vaxers survived after having smallpox, measles and polio vaccines (“There was more vigorous testing in past,” Daily Independent, Feb. 28, 2022)

... A great argument, just completely wrong.

Here is some of the history of those vaccines (Please do some research, too, something the author of the letter clearly failed to do).

The smallpox vaccine was the first vaccine to be developed against a contagious disease. In 1796, British doctor Edward Jenner, working with a much less lethal disease, cowpox, tried his vaccine on a couple of dairy maids and when it seemed to work, he was off and running with it.

The measles vaccine was first introduced in 1963. In that year, the Edmonston-B strain of measles virus was turned into a vaccine by John Enders and colleagues and licensed in the United States. It was started to be used after about two or three years testing, which looked like this.

In October 1960, an Enders team began trials on 1,500 mentally retarded children in New York City and on 4,000 children in Nigeria. In 1963 (three years later), a deactivated measles vaccine and an attenuated measles vaccine were introduced by Pfizer and Merck & Co., respectively.

Jonas Salk applied the Enders-Weller-Robbins technique to produce large quantities of poliovirus, and then developed a polio vaccine in 1952. After the 1954 polio vaccine field trial, whose success Salk announced on the radio, it was put into general use.

Why is it that the Information Age seems to have passed by so many people?