I think there’s a lot of truth there. To bring in another grandmother reference, my nana grew up in a small village in Italy. Think no indoor plumbing or electricity, chickens wandering into the back door, etc. She had multiple siblings who did not live to adulthood, and that was just normal. Proper medical care? Yeah, good luck.
She so loved America and being a citizen. The American dream was 100% true for her, and she and my poppy were far from wealthy. But can you imagine? In America you can get basic medical care, stuff absent where she grew up, an absence that killed people. Not to mention everyone has a car, and air conditioning? Indoor plumbing? What a country.
She once told me she’d rather die in America than live in Italy. People who have never lived through what she did? It’s all a conspiracy to make you do stuff for reasons.
They want to control you. I have never quite figured out why on earth they want to spy on or control the average working/poor stiff. It doesn’t make any sense.
My maternal grandmother was one of seven. Only two survived to make the voyage to America and reach adulthood. I know four died as infants, so I’m assuming disease. The remaining boy had been sent to a neighbor farm to work where he was starved to death. He’d been my great-grandmother’s favorite, and she never forgave her husband. He later died in a “pick axe accident” while working as a coal miner in Ohio. This was only a little over a hundred years ago.
The piece is by a Dr finding COVID vaccine hesitancy where he doesn’t expect it, and when he explores why concludes that:
It can be a revelation to some patients when they realize that they may be reacting to a sense of the waters being muddied rather than specific information or misinformation.
In other words people who are generally not vaccine hesitant have become it, not for any specific reason but just through the constant background hum of anti-vax nonsense.
A popular social media meme among antivaxers is to display graphics comparing the number of vaccines given to children in the 1980s to the current vaccine schedule*, as a way of expressing outrage over the fact that we protect kids against many more diseases now than we used to. Some declare that since the human race survived prior to these vaccines being available, we don’t need them.
Maybe a walk through a 19th century cemetery to see the headstones of children who died of now-preventable infectious diseases would make them think. But probably not.
*another popular antivax meme involves a photo of an infant surrounded by dozens of hypodermic needles pointing in its direction. The photo actually represents the number of injections the infant’s mom received as part of her fertility treatments.
Deception is an essential antivax tactic.
There’s at least a temptation (and I recognize a bit of it in myself!) to believe that there’s a Way Things Are Supposed To Be and that it is, to a large extent, the way things were when one was oneself growing up and learning about how the world works.
It is awe-inspiring to realize that massive declines in many infectious diseases in recent decades came about not due to the entirely coincidental use of vaccines , but to sudden adoption of decent nutrition and sewage disposal in Western nations.
I don’t disagree, but some of the claims of the nutrition faction are darn right magical thinking. Yes, nutrition is important to good health, sanitation both in waste disposal and basic cleanliness, and food prep are crucial to reign in the spread of bacteria. However, eating well and being clean cannot by itself prevent disease. Science discovered successful sanitation and good nutrition. It also discovered decent ways to defeat diseases that those things alone can’t prevent. Vaccination.
Polio is an example of a disease worsened by improvements in sanitation.
Before the early 20th century, improper sewage disposal meant that exposure to polio (an enterovirus) typically occurred in infancy, resulting in herd immunity; infants also had protection from maternally-passed antibodies. After modern sewage systems were instituted, that herd immunity waned, and paralytic polio outbreaks began affecting older children and adults.*
When you explain this to antivaxers, the result is either dead silence or attempts to change the subject.
*proper waste disposal had positive effects on health of course, includiing control of typhoid fever.
I’m sure Florida Surgeon General Ladapo will be along at any moment to comment on the seriousness of measles and urge parents to have their children vaccinated.
“Sometimes, all I need is the air that I breathe…” 
