Largest in recorded history is a bit of hyperbole. In the 1800s something like 80% of all Americans had the TB bacillus and of those that came down with TB a huge percentage died.
We did learn about the 1800's in school but apparently some of you did not pay attention.
There will always be some small percentage of your society that refuses to accept what is taught in school. The US has it bad because we've had multiple "Great Awakenings" that resulted in literal cults that grew to national size (mormonism, Church of Christ scientist, Jehova's Witnesses, thousands of various "Evangelical" fundamentalist sects) that all take as a foundational belief that the entirety of modern science is a massive cover-up to prevent people from knowing about god. They explicitly believe that scientists are Evil, and in league with Satan to keep them from god.
Fully ten percent of the American public for the past 50 years, or 30 million people believe "God created human beings in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years"
Those people have always been good at organizing and have groups that are extremely motivated because they genuinely believe they are fighting a holy war against Satan. They have driven American policy for centuries, from the religious portion of the southern states insisting that god wanted black people to be slaves, to the Christians being a large portion of the temperance movement that resulted in Prohibition, to the current Book bans, to driving a significant amount of the political pressure causing Visa and Mastercard to threaten to ban pornhub (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Expl...).
A huge percentage of flat earth believers for example are there because it is the logical endpoint of "you cannot trust any scientist because they are all in league to drive you away from god's light"
If 10% doesn't scare you, consider that the same insanity around a man named Kellog insisting in "purity of spirit", as in the religious meaning, is why 90% of White men in the US are circumcised. That rate is only comparable in Israel and nations with Islamic laws.
America struggles because of religion, specifically a breed of religion that insists you cannot trust any institution but it. Note how hostile the current admin was to a Preacher preaching peace.
We learned that we’ve progressed and that we’re totally different people now, so obviously we can’t end up with the same problems if we’re
stupid about it. (/s, kinda)
At least smallpox has been eradicated (except for potentially some bio weapons labs), so hopefully our stupidity won’t bring that back.
I mean, if you could get a large country that you had some enmity with to embrace anti-vaxx I guess weaponizing that smallpox might seem attractive, if you had really poor morals of course.
I assumed that the emphasis is correctly on "outbreak", ie: a single statistically significant increase, as opposed to a progressive increase over centuries (which is what led to the huge numbers in the 19th century)
Yeah, the phrase they were looking for is "largest on record", or more precisely "largest in the CDC's records".
"Recorded history" has a very specific definition that places it in contrast with "prehistory": it's the time period in which we have written records of any sort, as opposed to the time period in which there is no surviving writing. That both phrases have "record" in them doesn't make them synonymous.
