What If We Stopped Vaccinations?
How bad would things get if everyone stopped vaccinating their kids?
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TVTranscript
00:00 You've heard all the scary rumors surrounding vaccines.
00:09 They cause autism.
00:11 They contain toxins.
00:13 Even that they can give you the disease that they're trying to prevent.
00:16 It's misinformation like this that has caused American vaccination rates
00:20 to drop significantly over the past couple of decades.
00:24 Some people believe their children would be better off in a world without vaccines.
00:29 But do they fully grasp what that world would look like?
00:33 What kind of diseases would be welcomed back into our lives?
00:37 This is WHAT IF, and here's what would happen if we stopped vaccinations.
00:44 Through the years, vaccines have been successful in reducing the spread of deadly diseases
00:48 like measles, diphtheria, and rubella,
00:51 to the point where they've nearly disappeared from America.
00:55 When people stop seeing these diseases,
00:57 some start to wonder why we're still vaccinating against them.
01:01 Well, if you want to see how a so-called controlled disease can make a comeback,
01:05 just ask the people of Japan.
01:08 Let me paint a picture for you.
01:10 It's 1974 in Japan,
01:13 and 80% of people were getting the whooping cough vaccine.
01:16 With only 393 cases of whooping cough,
01:19 and zero related deaths throughout the whole country that year,
01:23 the Japanese started to let their guard down.
01:26 By 1979, only 10% of children were being vaccinated.
01:30 The result was a whopping 13,000 cases that year,
01:34 and 41 related deaths.
01:37 Shocked by the whole ordeal,
01:38 the Japanese quickly turned back to routine vaccination,
01:42 and the disease numbers dropped once again.
01:45 People usually see the decision not to vaccinate as a very personal, individual matter,
01:50 thinking they should have the right to be able to control what goes into their child's body.
01:55 Sure, we get that.
01:56 But what a lot of people don't understand
01:58 is that if everyone made the same individual decision,
02:02 it would have catastrophic effects,
02:04 and eventually spell far more danger for your child.
02:07 The fewer people who get vaccinated,
02:09 the more opportunities a disease has to spread.
02:13 When you decide not to get vaccinated,
02:15 you're not only accepting the possibility of contracting a disease yourself,
02:19 but also the chance of spreading it to others around you,
02:21 and playing a part in an epidemic.
02:24 There are hundreds of thousands of people who can't get vaccinated
02:27 due to treatments for cancer or other conditions,
02:30 and their safety relies on the rest of us being vaccinated.
02:34 The next time someone tries to convince you that vaccines are too dangerous,
02:38 just let them consider what our world would look like without vaccines.
02:42 We'd be transported back to a world we thought we had overcome,
02:46 where life for children was especially brutal.
02:49 In America, every year, 48,000 people would be hospitalized with measles,
02:54 and 500 would die.
02:57 The chickenpox would cause 10,000 children to be hospitalized,
03:01 and between 70 and 100 would die.
03:04 And Hepatitis A and B would re-emerge as silent epidemics
03:08 affecting millions of people.
03:11 These are just a handful of the old diseases
03:13 that would come back to wreak havoc if we all stopped vaccinations.
03:17 So why stop?
03:19 There hasn't been a single credible study linking vaccines to long-term health conditions.
03:24 In fact, the paper that started the theory that vaccines cause autism
03:29 was so discredited that the author lost his medical license.
03:33 Maybe one day, we'll be able to eradicate all diseases from our planet.
03:38 But would new challenges just come to take their place?
03:41 Well, that's a topic for another WHAT IF.
03:44 [MUSIC]