All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
March 25, 2025 - Skeptoid
23:04
Skeptoid #981: Vaccines: Success Story of the Century

Vaccines are history's great medical success story, having saved more lives than anything else. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Humanity's Greatest Medical Achievement 00:10:04
Vaccines have been hailed as humanity's greatest achievement in medical science, having saved more lives than any other intervention for any medical condition.
Some people believe this according to the evidence.
Other people reject it in spite of the evidence.
So today, we're going to have a look at the top 10 superstar vaccines and find out just what each of them has done for humanity.
And we're going to do that right now on Skeptoid.
A quick reminder for everyone, you're listening to Skeptoid, revealing the true science and true history behind urban legends every week since 2006.
With over a thousand episodes, we're celebrating 20 years of keeping it focused and keeping it brief.
And we couldn't have done it without your curiosity leading the way.
And now we're even offering a little bit more.
If you become a premium member, supporting the show with a monthly micropayment of as little as $5, you get more Skeptoid.
The premium version of the show is not only ad-free, it has extended content.
These episodes are a few minutes longer.
We get rid of the ads and we'll replace them with more Skeptoid.
The extended premium show available now.
Come to skeptoid.com and click Go Premium.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Vaccines Success Story of the Century.
Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not.
It seems incredible to still have to say it, but vaccines save lives.
The data could not possibly be any more stark, but nevertheless, the U.S. and the rest of the world in general is seeing an ever-increasing level of vaccine denial.
Claims that vaccines cause more harm than good are shouted through megaphones.
U.S. states are enacting anti-vaccine legislation with reckless abandon.
So today, we're going to take a stroll through the garden of vaccine success stories and try to counter all that disinformation with a gala of the very best things vaccines have done for us.
2024 marked the 50th anniversary of the World Health Organization's expanded program on immunization, launched in 1974 to try and bring the benefits of vaccinations to populations all over the globe.
A group of authors published an assessment of the program's success in The Lancet in May 2024.
They found that during just those 50 years, vaccines saved an estimated 154 million lives.
Here's a stat from that study.
Because most vaccine-preventable deaths are of young children, cutting their lives short by an average of 66 years, those 154 million lives saved equate to 10.2 billion years of full health gained.
If you are one who prefers to look at these things not in terms of the human cost, but in the monetary cost, that's one full year of the entire planet's economic productivity.
But however you prefer to view it, let's now celebrate the top 10 vaccine success stories.
Starting with number 10, yellow fever.
557,000 lives saved from 1974 to 2024.
Yellow fever came and went in waves of epidemics, and it averaged about 80,000 people killed each year around the world.
In the United States, as many as 135 outbreaks in the 18th and 19th centuries killed up to 20,000 Americans each.
It's a horrible disease.
Depending on various factors, it can be fatal in as many as 50% of cases.
Work in the 1930s finally resulted in an effective vaccine.
In fact, it's the same as we still use today.
It's one of the oldest vaccines.
Today, nobody dies of yellow fever in the U.S.
It's due to the vaccine and to mosquito control.
So the vaccine is no longer given, unless you're traveling someplace where it's still endemic, like Africa or South America.
Those other regions still suffer some 60 to 75,000 deaths a year.
Number nine, polio.
1,570,000 lives saved from 1974 to 2024.
Before Jonas Salk famously invented the vaccine, there were approximately half a million polio cases around the world annually, which killed an average of about 35,000 children every year.
And it left far more permanently crippled, or worse, living out their lives in iron lungs.
But then, Jonas Salk saved the day in 1955, and a few years later, an oral vaccine came out.
These terminated polio by 1979 in the United States, when the last known case was reported.
Except there was a complication.
That oral vaccine used various strains of live but weakened virus, and it is safe and effective, except in cases where not enough other people have been vaccinated, and that weakened strain can then spread in what's called VDPV, or vaccine-derived poliovirus.
So we don't use that version anymore since 2000, just the inactivated poliovirus vaccine.
Worldwide, there were 689 cases of VDPD.
Still a far cry from half a million.
Number eight, pneumococcus.
1,623,000 lives saved from 1974 to 2024.
The bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae causes pneumococcal disease, which can result in pneumonia, meningitis, and sepsis.
These in turn can result in brain damage, deafness, loss of a limb, or death.
So you don't want it.
The vaccine was first licensed in 1977 and improved in 1983.
Throughout the 2000s, new versions were introduced for young children, adults, and adults over 65.
Prior to that, pneumococcus caused 14.5 million cases a year in children under five, some 18% of which resulted in severe pneumonia and killed 541,000 children under 5 each year.
Before those age-specific vaccines were introduced in the U.S., we lost 6,000 children under 5 each year and 22,000 people across all age groups.
Since then, there are now only about 3,700 deaths in the U.S. each year, mostly in adults over 65, and an 89% reduction in pediatric pneumococcal meningitis deaths.
One interesting little factoid is that every $1 invested in this vaccine yields $7.7 in economic benefits through reduced healthcare costs and productivity gains.
Number 7.
Haemophilus influenza type B. 2,858,000 lives saved from 1974 to 2024.
A lot of Americans might not have even heard of this because the vaccine has virtually wiped it out in this country.
This is one of the regularly scheduled vaccines for young children in the United States, given in three or four doses beginning at about six weeks of age.
Haemophilus influenza type B, or HIB, is a bacterium that causes HIB disease, usually resulting in either meningitis or pneumonia.
It could cause blindness, deafness, learning disabilities, or death.
Prior to the vaccine, about 20,000 American children developed a serious illness each year, and 5% of them died.
20% were permanently debilitated.
Nearly all cases were in children under the age of five.
The first vaccine was developed in 1985, with an improved version introduced in 1987.
Cases in the United States have dropped by more than 99.9%.
But globally, that number only went down by 80%, from over 8 million serious cases and 370,000 deaths every year, to about 1 million cases and about 30,000 deaths.
The reason?
Very slow uptake of the vaccine, especially among low-income countries.
Full vaccine coverage is currently reaching only about three-quarters of children worldwide.
Number six, tuberculosis.
10,902,000 lives saved between 74 and 2024.
Famously and historically known as the consumption, tuberculosis remains today as the world's top infectious killer.
10 million people worldwide are infected every year, and 1.5 million of them die every year.
Half of them are in just eight low-income countries.
In the 1800s, it was responsible for one quarter of all deaths.
But if it seems odd that this many people are still dying from it every year, yet we're citing it as a vaccine superstar, the reason is twofold.
First, a huge number of people get TB every year.
And second, the vaccine called BCG is among the least effective.
It's only from 0 to 80% effective on individuals at preventing an infection.
The Cost of Vaccine Hesitancy 00:09:28
But if you do get the infection, it reduces the likelihood you'll become seriously ill by 60%.
So it's not magical, but it's certainly a lot better than nothing.
Needless to say, at least five new vaccines are under development that we hope will be far more effective.
In a world that can feel overwhelming, spreading thoughtful, evidence-based content is one of the best ways to make a positive impact.
Ask your local public radio station to air the Skeptoid Files, a 30-minute radio-friendly version of Skeptoid that pairs two related episodes promoting real science, true history, and critical thinking.
And in these challenging times for public media, we're offering these broadcasts for free to radio stations, available on the PRX Exchange or directly from Skeptoid Media.
It's an easy ask.
Just send a quick message to your station's programming director.
By helping to bring the Skeptoid files to the airwaves, you'll help promote the essential skills we all need to tell fact from fiction.
Just go to your local station's website, find the programming director's email address, or just their general email address.
You can even use the telephone.
I know that might sound crazy.
It's an old legacy device that allows real-time voice communication.
I know that's weird, but hey, it's an option.
The world can feel chaotic, but you're not powerless.
When you promote critical thinking, you can help your community tell fact from fiction.
And that's how we shape a better future.
In uncertain times, spreading good ideas can make you feel helpful, not helpless.
Let's stand up for reason, truth, and understanding together.
Get them to air the skeptoid files from skeptoid media available on the PRX Exchange and they'll know what that is.
Number five, pertussis, 13,155,000 lives saved from 1974 to 2024.
aka whooping cough pertussis is endemic worldwide epidemics of its cycle every two to five years in every country so numbers change a lot year to year before the vaccine the united states averaged 178 000 cases per year 93 of them in children under 10.
But since the vaccine's introduction in 1938 and several improvements over subsequent decades, cases in the U.s are way down, averaging 1000 to 30 000 a year as those cyclical epidemics ebb and flow.
Today there are an estimated 160 000 deaths annually worldwide, almost all of them in developing nations, especially Africa, where uptake of the vaccine is extremely low.
The United States is one of the very few nations with an increasing rate of incidence, due entirely to fewer vaccines being administered by vaccine hesitant parents.
Number four covet 19, 2.5 million to 20 million lives saved over all time.
Why such an enormous range of nearly a full order of magnitude?
The short reason is that it's been too soon.
I read estimates ranging from 1 million to 25 million, and one reason for that is that different studies considered different populations, different date ranges, even different strains of the virus.
These studies are also complicated by whether indirect effects should be included.
When lots of people are vaccinated, unvaccinated people are far less likely to catch it from someone.
Do you count those unvaccinated people as having had their lives saved?
It's also complicated by excess mortality measures and whether they should be included.
These can include questions like whether you count the victims of a fire which wasn't put out because firemen were quarantined, the hospital was overwhelmed and people died from other conditions because they weren't adequately treated.
Even things like there were no traffic deaths that day, which there otherwise would have been, because the lockdowns kept everyone off the road.
In time, we'll be able to look back with clearer vision and have firmer numbers.
For now, about the one thing where there's a clear consensus is that the vast majority of lives saved some 95 percent of them were of people over 60.
Number three tetanus, 27 million nine hundred fifty five thousand lives saved from 1974 to 2024.
Data is scarce on how many people died of tetanus before the vaccine became widespread, because the majority of deaths were neonatal and were in regions where there was already high infant mortality.
The vaccine had been around since the early 20th century, but uptake on it remained very low throughout most of the century.
In 1999, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the UN Population Fund launched a program called the Maternal and Neonatal Tetanus Elimination Initiative with the goal of vaccinating enough people to get the neonatal tetanus incidence rate down to one in 1,000 live births.
As today, only 11 nations have yet to achieve that.
That program has brought down global newborn deaths from an estimated 787,000 in 1988 to just 25,000 in 2018.
That's a 97% reduction.
Number two, measles.
93,712,000 lives saved between 1974 and 2024 alone.
Measles.
Ah, yes, the thing that really shouldn't be headlines in 2025, but somehow it is.
Because of vaccine disinformation.
Measles used to be a leading cause of childhood mortality, with 6 million children a year dying from it before the vaccine.
100 million children got it every year, 4 million of those in the United States.
Those who survived were often left with pneumonia, deafness, or encephalitis.
Then, in 1963, the first vaccine was licensed.
This has been one of the great success stories.
Just 10 years after its introduction, measles cases in the U.S. dropped by 99.8% to just 10,000.
In the year 2000, measles was declared eradicated in the United States.
But then, 2025 happened, with widespread growth in public vaccine and science denial, led by public figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
As parents are increasingly refusing to allow their children to receive the vaccine, citing their religious or ideological objections to public health, children are dying in the United States again from measles for the first time in a quarter of a century.
Number one, smallpox.
500 million lives saved all time.
It is the king of all vaccine success stories.
Smallpox was one of the deadliest diseases humankind has ever faced.
It killed a third of everyone who got it and spread easily.
It is now officially eradicated worldwide, thanks entirely to the vaccine.
It remains the only disease we have so far managed to completely wipe off the face of the earth, with the last known case having occurred in 1977.
The World Health Organization declared it eradicated in 1980.
We don't know how many hundreds of millions of people died of smallpox before.
It's even been found in Egyptian mummies as early as 1350 BCE.
In the last century of its existence, it's estimated to have killed 500 million people.
Extrapolate that back as many centuries as you like.
For much of smallpox's multi-millennium history, people around the world were attempting to inoculate against it, even with some success.
They would grind up scabs from people who had survived smallpox and took the powder up their noses.
They would lance the boils of animals with cowpox and needle it into people's arms.
Hearing that this tended to be successful, in 1796, Dr. Edward Jenner injected a healthy boy with cowpox, waited two months, then injected him with smallpox.
The boy never got sick, and the world's first vaccine was born.
By the early 1800s, smallpox epidemics in most countries stopped.
By the early 1900s, there were almost no cases anywhere.
And now it's gone.
If we can do it once, we can do it again.
Vaccines not only save lives, they save enormous amounts of money in saved healthcare costs.
In 2011, the CDC issued a report finding that childhood vaccination prevents approximately 42,000 deaths in the United States every year, prevents 20 million cases of disease every year, and saves $20 billion in direct costs and $100 billion in total societal costs in 2025 dollars.
Supporting Skeptoid Premium Members 00:03:28
So it's absolutely clear from the data that people who seek ideological or other exemptions from their children's vaccines are not only putting their children's lives at a very real risk, they are costing themselves and all the rest of us quite a lot of money in caring for unvaccinated children who are stricken with vaccine-preventable diseases.
We continue with an easy-to-understand explanation of mRNA vaccines and a quick debunk of some of the popular misinformation about them in the ad-free and extended premium feed.
To access it, become a supporter at skeptoid.com slash go premium.
A great big skeptoid shout out to our premium supporters, including the Dalek Llama, Alastair Gilmore, Lisa Bedell from Baltimore, and Dorian from Knoxville.
I'll be in person at the Arkansas Governor's School this summer, and I'll also be on the Skeptoid Adventures trip to the Bermuda Triangle.
You can probably still get a ticket.
Check it out at skeptoid.com slash events.
And of course, I'm here in Bend, Oregon every month, hosting Skeptoid's very own Super Science Trivia.
To book me for your own event, come to skeptoid.com slash speaking.
Watch our feature documentary film, Science Friction, a shocking look at how TV networks will edit scientists out of context and misrepresent them.
Science Friction, available on most major streaming services.
Free accompanying educational materials for teachers are provided on the movie's website at sciencefriction.tv.
Skeptoid is a production of Skeptoid Media.
Director of Operations and Tinfoil Hat Counter is Kathy Reitmeyer.
Marketing guru and Illuminati liaison is Jake Young.
Production Management and All Things Audio by Will McCamblis.
Music is by Lee Sanders.
Researched and written by me, Brian Dunning.
Listen to Skeptoid for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or iHeart.
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello, everyone.
This is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the teacher's toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From P R X.
Export Selection