Have vaccine benefits been exaggerated?

Anti-vaccine lawyer Aaron Siri has a new video claiming that vaccines have not saved as many lives as experts say. He argues that the estimates are wrong and says that better sanitation and antibiotics deserve more credit.

One of the biggest problems with Siri’s argument is that he misunderstands what the study is measuring. The study does not say that more than a million people died between 1994 and 2023 and were saved by vaccines.

Instead, it follows millions of children born during those years and estimates how many illnesses and deaths vaccines will prevent over their entire lives. For example, a baby protected from hepatitis B today may avoid liver cancer or liver failure many decades from now. Those future lives saved are included in the estimate.

Better sanitation, cleaner water, healthier food, improved medical care, and vaccines all helped save lives from infectious diseases. Clean water and sanitation were especially important for diseases spread through dirty food or water, like typhoid and severe diarrhea.

But many diseases dropped much faster after vaccines became available. For example, polio cases fell sharply after the polio vaccine was introduced, and measles cases dropped from hundreds of thousands each year to very low numbers after children began getting vaccinated routinely.

The World Health Organization also says that widespread diphtheria vaccination greatly reduced both the number of people who got diphtheria and the number who died from it, even in countries with very different levels of sanitation and healthcare.