In the United Kingdom, in 1974, the number of people who got the vaccine against pertussis (whooping cough) dropped. By 1978, the country had an epidemic of this disease. More than 100,000 people got it, and 36 people died.
A diphtheria epidemic happened in the former Soviet Union because children stopped getting the vaccine and adults did not get booster shots. The number of cases of this disease soared from 839 in 1989 to nearly 50,000 in 1994. About 1,700 people died.
Thanks to vaccines, there has not been a single case of smallpox in the world since 1977. Polio has been wiped out in North, Central and South America, as well as other countries.
For more details, please see the chapters on specific vaccines in the
Canadian Immunization Guide, 7th Edition 2006. Some vaccines also work by creating “herd immunity”. When most people in a community have received a vaccine for a particular disease, the chance of an outbreak of that disease is greatly reduced. This “herd immunity” protects the small number of people who cannot be immunized for medical reasons or for whom the vaccine did not work. For herd immunity to be effective, however, as many people as possible must be vaccinated.
So much for all vaccines being useless.