As Promised ...

Post #1254

The prior article on this topic is here.

---

I promised my readers that I would be able to come up with a least one single officially-recorded, publicly-reported measles death prior to the measles vaccine of 1968 — all throughout all of England & Wales. I am happy to report that I have succeeded in keeping my promise. Here you go:

At bottom left there were 4,490 measles infections for the week ending on 3 Jan 1948 and there was also one measles death reported for England & Wales. I have kept my promise now, but let me explain a frustration I have with “the Brits.” Unbeknownst to me, in the very next week after this report on 24 Jan 1948, there is a tiny footnote:

“Deaths for measles and scarlet fever for England and Wales, London (administrative county), will no longer be published.”

Whuh?

As I have now looked through hundreds of weekly reports searching for a measles death in England and Wales, all of the time not knowing that the British Medical Journal had decided — back in Jan 1948 — not to publish them, I’m miffed. If the Great Britlanders Norman Fenton and Martin Neil read this substack, they laughed.

That’s because they likely knew the whole time that I was on a wild goose chase for an elusive measles death, searching through a British publication which had stopped reporting that statistic — but yet kept on publishing a table with the cell in that table sitting there, making you think that they would publish a measles death if found.

It is cold and cruel British humor.

Shame on them (if they are readers) for allowing that practical joke to play out for so long! Anyway, back to the drawing board. Here is another weekly report with thousands of measles cases in England and Wales, but only one death again:

If you check the year prior in each case (right side of table), you find one measles death per 1,000 cases in 1946 for both weeks — but the lethality of measles came way down for 1947, and this might have been the “reason” to stop publishing measles mortality data in a manner in which it can be followed up (paper trail).

If it can be proven that it takes several thousand cases of measles to produce a death, then public health bureaucracies could expect less funding and control over society. The bureaucracy grows in response to “perceived need” — so there is a perverse incentive for public health officials to overstate the dangers of diseases.

Measles was no longer dangerous, so they stopped reporting official statistics on it. In economic terms, you do not get as much “bang-for-your-buck” if you clutter-up the public’s attention-span with notifications about diseases that are mild ones, like measles. It is better to save the ink for the big threats.

By not publishing the numbers, the public was never allowed to witness just how safe measles had gotten by 1948 and beyond.

Reference

[last-ever measles death officially-recorded and publicly-reported in England & Wales] — Epidemiology Section. Br Med J. 1948 Jan 24;1(4542):179-80. PMID: 20787267; PMCID: PMC2089272. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2089272/