Measles Mortality Was at an All-Time Low BEFORE the Introduction of the Vaccine

Did you know that measles deaths had already dropped by over 90% before the vaccine was even introduced? 🤔 The dramatic decline in mortality wasn’t due to the vaccine itself but rather to better nutrition, sanitation, and healthcare.

 In this episode of The Partovi Effect, Dr. Ryan and Mrs. Madi Partovi dive into the historical data on measles mortality, revealing a surprising truth: the vaccine wasn’t the driving force behind the decline in deaths. They explore how improved healthcare, nutrition, and the treatment of secondary infections were the real game changers.

📊 With references from PubMed, CDC, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, this conversation challenges common narratives around measles and offers a nuanced perspective backed by data. Whether you're passionate about public health or simply curious about the untold history of vaccines, this episode is a must-watch.

👉 Hit play to discover why measles was already on the decline before the vaccine rollout.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Purpose
• 1:17 Historical Context of Measles Mortality
• 7:10 Impact of Nutrition and Healthcare on Measles

Transcript

 Measles mortality was at an all-time low BEFORE the introduction of the vaccine.

[00:00:00] 

[00:00:00] Introduction and Purpose

[00:00:00] Mrs. Madi Partovi: Welcome to this episode of The Partovi Effect. My name is Mrs. Madi Partovi. 

[00:00:05] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: And I'm Dr. Ryan Partovi. 

[00:00:07] Mrs. Madi Partovi: And our intention in talking about the measles outbreak.

[00:00:12] Mrs. Madi Partovi: is to, you're just gonna go right there. I am Not even any, not, not even any kind of pre, like, how's it been going? It's been a couple weeks. Okay. No, no, I don't actually. All right. So our intention is to bring a sense of calm and ease and respect. To this conversation, I have seen so much divisiveness, personal attacks online and this black and white thinking with no nuance whatsoever.

[00:00:48] Mrs. Madi Partovi: 

[00:00:49] Mrs. Madi Partovi: Measles. All right, here we go.

[00:00:51] Mrs. Madi Partovi: I'm going to do a screen share. So for most of this, you're going to see our screen and probably we're going to [00:01:00] be in a little box somewhere. Okay. So what I'm going to do is we're going to kind of read through this and then we'll pause and talk about various points. Okay. And if you have questions, just, Wave at me. 

[00:01:17] Historical Context of Measles Mortality[00:01:17] Measles: Historical Context and Mortality

[00:01:17] Mrs. Madi Partovi: So measles historical mortality long term benefits and vitamin a literature review first looking at the historical decline in measles mortality pre vaccine so dramatic drop in mortality before Vaccines so historical data show that measles mortality had already fallen over 90 percent in developed countries like the United States before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963.

[00:01:44] Mrs. Madi Partovi: Now I want you to remember that date 1963 because that's a really important date as we go along to reference okay is this before 1963 we're talking or after 1963 and you know absolutely we could take a look here. [00:02:00] At the different sources. Most of them are going to be either from PubMed or directly from CDC.

[00:02:04] Mrs. Madi Partovi: I asked chat GPT to really focus on independent non biased which sources. Of course, it pulled mostly from government sources because that's its idea of independent non biased, which you can debate that. But I think it's probably the best we've got at this point. So just keep that in mind. Improved living conditions and medical care in the early to mid 20th century greatly reduced measles fatalities in the U.

[00:02:29] Mrs. Madi Partovi: S. Measles became a nationally reportable disease in 1912. And in that first decade, there was an average of about 6000 measles related deaths. each year. Now keep in mind the population at this time was much lower than it is today, right? By the fifties, the decade just before the vaccines came out in 1963, virtually all children still caught the measles, three to five million cases annually.

[00:02:56] Mrs. Madi Partovi: So keep that three to five million cases, yet only about [00:03:00] 400 to 500 deaths per year were reported. This represented a 90 greater than 90 percent decline in mortality rate compared to the early 1900s, just a few decades earlier, and still before the vaccine was introduced. So purely better due to better nutrition, sanitation and medical treatments.

[00:03:20] Mrs. Madi Partovi: So this figure, which I'm about to click on, so we can all see it more closely illustrates the steep drop in measles deaths in the United States long before widespread vaccination. And then you can see here that. So the red line here is looking at the measles death rate. which has really rarely been zero, although there have been years where we've had zero deaths.

[00:03:44] Mrs. Madi Partovi: And one of the things that RFK Jr. has been criticized recently is saying, Oh, measles outbreaks are kind of just a thing that happens, right? If you look at the But they're 

[00:03:51] Mrs. Madi Partovi: not, he said they're not unusual. They're 

[00:03:53] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: not unusual, yeah. That's correct, right? If you look at the green line here, you can see that even though that [00:04:00] the reported cases, and remember, reported cases is not necessarily the same as Diagnosed or actually people who got infected.

[00:04:07] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: So there's infection rate and then there's case rate. And those are two different things. We'll get more into that in a minute. But this green line shows you the reported measles cases. And you can see that there's, they kind of go up some years and they kind of go down, but that The death rate has stayed very low since the mid 90s, and that's due to some research that came out and we'll get into that in a minute, but in terms of how best to treat measles, and we have a much better understanding of that now than we did in past years.

[00:04:36] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: But even prior to that, you see, in the 1960s the death rate is One was well below one per 100, 000 people prior to the introduction of the vaccine and really that the death rate itself is more of a function of the actual case rate than it is the vaccine. So even though here we [00:05:00] are in the mid See, this is the mid, probably 90s.

[00:05:03] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: There was kind of a bump or in the early 90s, late 80s, early 90s, there was a bump in cases, even though we had really high vaccination rates at that time, you still see the death rate come up as well. So death rate doesn't really seem to really track the vaccination rate as much as it does the case rate of how many people are getting diagnosed with measles.

[00:05:25] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: But you do see that the. The reduction in total cases did start to come down. After the vaccine. So I think that's probably and there's a common misconception here, which is that, oh, if the case rate came down, that means that fewer people were contracting measles not actually how vaccines work.

[00:05:46] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: That's not actually correct. What happens is people will still get exposed to the measles virus, but their immune system will inactivate it will destroy it will target it and destroy it faster so that they won't end up in many [00:06:00] cases developing symptoms or at least the symptoms will be so mild that they won't even realize that they had measles so it's not that the vaccine truly eradicates the disease it's the vaccine primes the immune system either through the act through the creation of acquired immunity which is antibodies or through memory cells, which are, kind of a more interesting part of the immune system where basically the cells, the body can remember an infection that happened decades earlier and respond more quickly in the future through the use of these memory cells.

[00:06:31] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: Did you have any questions about any of this? Because I know some of it's pretty scientific. 

[00:06:35] Mrs. Madi Partovi: So it's not true that measles was eradicated in 2000. 

[00:06:39] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: No, we may not have had any cases in the United States, but it's not true that it was eradicated because the virus is still floating around. It just may be that, there were no reported cases, but there probably were people that were getting measles.

[00:06:52] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: They just didn't get sick enough to go to the doctor, and it was mostly contained to small areas, which is usually what you [00:07:00] see. When they talk about an outbreak, what they mean is that you're getting enough cases that you're getting certain people that are getting really sick. All right. 

[00:07:10] Impact of Nutrition and Healthcare on Measles

[00:07:10] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: So let's look at what were the drivers of this decline in mortality from measles.

[00:07:18] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: So primary drivers of decline were advances in health care and nutrition, not vaccines. And you see this reported, this is this is a study from, do, this is 2015, actually, so not too long ago that looks at the fact that, that really, And you see this over and over again in the literature where it is acknowledged that it's primarily healthcare, nutrition, sanitation that is driving this.

[00:07:44] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: You see a lot of also the ability to use antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections, so pneumonia that comes after measles, which is usually what would be the killer. Right. It's actually not the measles infection, but it's the bacterial infection that you get after the [00:08:00] measles, because remember, you have two primary modes that you're the immune system can go into th one response, which is viruses and cancer, and then th two response, which is allergies and bacteria.

[00:08:13] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: And so what happens is that if your body, if your immune system gets busy. With the th one response against a particular virus, then it may leave it vulnerable to a bacterial after the fact. And so the bacteria comes and they get maybe causes pneumonia, some other bacterial infection. And then that's ultimately usually the cause of death.

[00:08:33] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: So even pro vaccine public health authorities acknowledge this. IDS, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, IDSA, notes that measles deaths began increasing before the vaccine was introduced, thanks to advances in healthcare, such as better treatment of measles complications like pneumonia.

[00:08:48] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: So this is literally the Infectious Diseases Society of America that is where this is coming from. You can read about this on their website. In short, by the mid 20th [00:09:00] century in well nourished populations, measles and well nourished is really important. We'll come back to that in a minute. Measles had typically become a mild childhood infection with relatively rare serious outcomes.

[00:09:11] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: So this is this key component of well nourished versus under nourished. So in well nourished healthy children, the case fatality rate had fallen by the mid century. To only about 1 in 10, 000 cases resulted in death in 1960 again, three years before the vaccine, there were about 442, 000 reported cases, 380 deaths total, but there were an estimated 3.

[00:09:37] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: 5 to 5 million total measles infections that year. So this is getting back to that comment I was making earlier about cases 3. 5 to 5 million. And that's, we can evaluate that based on different models that allow us to project that, mainly looking at antibody levels and things like that to see, did people's bodies respond to the virus?

[00:09:58] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: And if it did, then you probably [00:10:00] had the virus, whether you realized you had it or not. And then cases are ones that people actually went to a doctor and the case was reported. And then, of the 3. 5 to 5 million total people that got infected. 380 deaths. So this is fatality on order of about 0.

[00:10:16] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: 01 percent or less in a generally well nourished population. So that aligns with This historical case fatality rate. You've had measles fatality back in the early, early, early 20th century was the case fatality rate was definitely higher 21 deaths per 1000 cases. So way up at 2. 1%. But then it right before the vaccine came out, dropped to below one death per 1000 cases.

[00:10:45] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: 0. 1%. By contrast, Then in populations where you have malnutrition, lack of medical care, measles is much more lethal. So in parts of West Africa during the mid 20th century community studies were showing [00:11:00] case fatality rates of 10 to 20 percent. So 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 cases were fatal during measles epidemics because of the fact that these kids were undernourished.

[00:11:09] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: So pre vaccine measles globally, not looking just at the United States, still caused about a million deaths per year. But again, mostly in the developing countries. And as we will see in a minute, mostly due to Vitamin A deficiency but in well fed societies, measles deaths have become very infrequent by the 1950s, and all of that to conclude that severity of measles is highly context dependent, and in affluent settings by the 1950s, measles okay,

[00:11:43] Dr. Ryan Partovi, JD, NMD, MIFHI: Once again, I've been Dr. Ryan Partovi. I am Dr. Ryan Partovi, and I will continue hopefully to be God willing, Dr. Ryan Partovi. 

[00:11:50] Mrs. Madi Partovi: And again, I am Mrs. Madi Partovi, and this is the Parto Effect, creating the consensus.