Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of human lives. Human lives are valuable. Refusal to get vaccinated against things like measles, polio, smallpox, or COVID-19 cause a lot of unnecessary deaths, which destroys a lot of valuable things.
Just as spending on loss prevention in stores can easily produce a net positive impact on the store's balance sheet, reducing the rate of unnecessary destruction of human life (or other forms of permanent damage short of death) from diseases for which vaccines exist produces net positive impacts on the tax rolls/life insurance balance sheet/quality of life.
I guess "produce profit and avoid unnecessary misery and harm" is a political purpose, but I don't understand how anyone could speak derisively about it.
The thing that really hammers home that there's something to study here is that we basically eliminated polio through vaccination campaigns, and we did this in my lifetime. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched in 1988 (one year after I was launched), and since then the number of annual cases has dropped by 99.9%, from 350/year to a handful. 2% of the people that contracted polio suffered paralysis, which would necessitate living in an iron lung to keep breathing.
Before last year, I would have said that the clear and obvious harms of polio were the reason so many people got vaccinated that polio is basically eradicated. But since the start of COVID, over 10 million humans have died miserable deaths from COVID, yet so many people reject the vaccine.
There's an extremely grave threat, but there's also an easy way to gain near complete invincibility to that threat, but tens of millions of people in just the US are refusing invincibility to COVID. 99.2% of US COVID deaths now are among the unvaccinated [0]! 99.2%!!! Clearly there's something going on to make so many people make such an irrational choice, and that's worth studying, as the benefit of getting a few more people to embrace invulnerability is worth so much more than the cost of funding some research and outreach.
> since [1988] the number of annual [Polio] cases has dropped by 99.9%, from 350/year to a handful
And what's more, that's not even the impressive part of the curve in terms of magnitude. Polio was once so commonplace that the idea of being anti-vax would have been completely absurd to everyone just some 40/50 years ago, when you had someone crippled by childhood paralysis (of which Polio is the most common cause) living in basically every city block. And even in the White House, from 1933 to 1945.
Vaccine hesitancy is largely irrational, however polio and COVID-19 are hardly comparable. Polio has a 2 - 5% infection fatality rate for children and young adults, whereas the COVID-19 IFR for the same age group is close to 0. We're talking about multiple orders of magnitude difference in relative risk.
Just as spending on loss prevention in stores can easily produce a net positive impact on the store's balance sheet, reducing the rate of unnecessary destruction of human life (or other forms of permanent damage short of death) from diseases for which vaccines exist produces net positive impacts on the tax rolls/life insurance balance sheet/quality of life.
I guess "produce profit and avoid unnecessary misery and harm" is a political purpose, but I don't understand how anyone could speak derisively about it.