Were pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines responsible for the modern increase in human lifespan?
Advertising & corporate-sponsored education leads us to believe that our longevity is due to pharmaceutical drugs & vaccination. However, many studies show that the impact of these drugs and vaccines were in fact minimal, almost non-existent, on the decrease of infectious disease, the decrease in mortality and on the increase in human lifespan (in the industrialised countries during the 19th and 20th centuries). For instance, “Researchers John & Sonya McKinlay …showed that medical intervention only accounted for between 1 & 3.5 per cent of the increase in the average lifespan in the United States since 1900.” (1) Similarly, in the words of Dr. R. Taylor, in Australia “almost 80 per cent of the reduction in infant mortality between the 1880s & the 1970s occurred prior to the 1930s.” (2) That is, the death rates for infants decreased and was in steep decline long before the widespread use of pharmaceutical drugs or vaccines designed to combat infectious diseases. Extensive vaccination
