Forget the High Risks of Measles, Etc.; Mostly Ignored are That Death Rates From These Diseases Dramatically Declined, Way Before Vaccines Available..

A friend emails:

All this nonsense on TV & in press, is not only annoying, but based on ignorance, IMO.  I've been familiar with below arguments/data for many years, but quickly just found these 2 data points:


http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/020132sinclair/vaccinaion.htm

...
by 1955, still eight years before the start of this vaccine, there had been a 97% decline in the death rate from measles since [1900)]..., , Communicable Diseases Handbook by L. Claire Bennett and Sarah Searl from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. On Page 44 it states: "An effective inoculation program should obviously result in a lowered incidence of the particular disease under surveillance. For instance, since 1963 there have been more than 80 million doses of red measles vaccine given. The number of reported cases has gone from a pre-1963 total of about 500,000 to a total of about 35,000 in 1975". Now this suggests that the vaccine was indeed responsible for this decline, that is until we go back to 1958 and learn that the number of cases was 800,000! In other words, measles cases were in decline before the 1963 vaccine commenced. (In fact by 1955, still eight years before the start of this vaccine, there had been a 97% decline in the death rate from measles since the turn of the century!) What is more, medical authorities have since acknowledged that the 1963 measles vaccine was a complete failure!

http://www.whale.to/vaccines/decline1.html