🚨*Covid-19 may be responsible for more than 18 million deaths worldwide*🚨
While infectious diseases like this have devastated humanity, it may be wrong to assume they are always antithetical to our survival & flourishing as a species.
Otherwise, why would ancient pathogens such as malaria, cholera, typhoid, measles & flu persist as human-only diseases & why have we not evolved immunity to them?
Was Boris Johnson right about living with COVID?
It's hard to imagine that the survival of the species was uppermost in peoples minds when successive wave of the Plague hit Europe in medieval times and as recently as the 1600s. Likewise with the terrifying outbreak of deadly influenza that ravaged the world around 1918. Why haven't we evolved immunity to them - well viruses and bacteria have this inconvenient habit of mutating so as to avoid our body's carefully laid immune system traps!
@AnthonyFStevens From reading wikipedia, smallpox became a child-disease in th 19th to 20th century. It might have relied on children heavily as carriers at that point, which lead to its eradication through the worldwide vaccination combined with behavioral changes. This was allways an easy to isolate disease it seems.
With behavioural changes & vaccine acceptance it's achievable, but as we've seen with COVID & the MMR #Vaccine, there are #CONspiracyTheorists out there actively seeking to convince the populous otherwise. 🤷🏾♂️
@AnthonyFStevens This comparison does not work that well, since smallpox was kind of already cornered as being a 'childrens disease' and it was likely easier to isolate. Its not like comtainment would have no effect with covid, but it is clearly better spreading than all other current human pathogens (excluding Malaria/all parasites, since they don't follow exponential human to human spread).
By vaccinating it out of existence. There is/was a highly effective vaccine against smallpox whose effectiveness was not greatly impacted by the pathogen mutating.
Influenza, on the other hand is very adept at mutating and therefore a new vaccine is required every single year. Even then, the vaccines for influenza are of extremely variable efficacy.
@Paulos_the_fog
It then begs the question how we managed to eradicate smallpox?