A huge reason that some among us feel that vaccines should not be mandatory is because vaccines have worked so well over the past ~80 years and collective memory fades. Likewise: A 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden?(1) Federal Government sanctioned removal of over 5,000 Native American children **annually** to white homes well into the 1970s?(2) Shhhhhh…. if we don’t think about it, we will forget and then it feels better.
Here’s a fact from the past: whooping cough (caused by the bacteria Bordetella pertussis) killed over 4,000 children pear year in the United States before 1943.(3)
Two things changed that – the introduction of the DTP vaccine (Diptheria, Tetanus & Pertussis) and antibiotics. I can just hear some in Florida reading something like that and saying: “Antibiotics! Yes! We don’t need vaccines because we have antibiotics! We can treat the sick people with antibiotics and protect our [insert # here]th Amendment rights!” (link1 link2 for context on Florida). Two words: antibiotic resistance. Strains of antibiotic resistant Bordetella pertussis have begun showing up(4).
Prediction for our future: antibiotic-resistant whooping cough + increasing rates of unvaccinated folks = more dead kids. I am not a medical doctor… I am not even a true expert in immunology and vaccines (just a guy with an old PhD in Immunology teaching Biology courses at a community college), but this stuff isn’t hard. Just ask the Russians what happened when their Diptheria vaccination rates dropped in the early 1990s.(5) But, as I am sure the civil libertarians will point out: that is a different bacteria (Corynebacterium diptheriae).
Shhhhhhhh, move along, nothing to see here….
References
- Lorie M. Graham, “The Past Never Vanishes”: A Contextual Critique of the Existing Indian Family Doctrine, 23 Am. Indian L. Rev. 1 (1998), https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/ailr/vol23/iss1/2
- Bort, R. (2019, February 19). When Nazis took over Madison Square Garden. Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/madison-square-garden-nazis-796197/
- Center for Disease Control. Reported morbidity and mortality in the United States annual summary 1979. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 1980;28(54). Accessed October 28, 2025. https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/1577/cdc_1577_DS1.pdf
- Pan American Health Organization. PAHO calls for strengthened vaccination and surveillance amid the spread of antibiotic-resistant pertussis in the Americas. Published August 26, 2025. Accessed October 28, 2025. https://www.paho.org/en/news/26-8-2025-paho-calls-strengthened-vaccination-and-surveillance-amid-spread-antibiotic
- Markina, S. S., Maksimova, N. M., Vitek, C. R., Bogatyreva, E. Y., & Monisov, A. A. (2000). Diphtheria in the Russian Federation in the 1990s. The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 181, S27–S34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3010996