Why should we consider it? Billions of people have been vaccinated without a vaccine-caused epidemic.

We do however have a virus-caused epidemic, currently.

What are we supposed to learn from that example? Companies developed safer techniques, government testing plans improved, it sounds like the system was improved in response to the kind of thing which happens with new technology.

More importantly, however, it happened in an era where everyone agreed that polio was worth avoiding. The modern antivax movement was founded on Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent attempts to cash in on test kits and lawsuits brought against vaccine manufacturers but it also critically depended on people who had grown up in a world of ubiquitous vaccination and preventative medicine, where vague claims sounded dire because the imagined baseline was “life is basically okay” rather than “I know multiple kids who died or were scarred for life” as their parents had known. Finally, there wasn’t a major political movement putting a billion-dollar propaganda machine to work spreading false claims and downplaying the real impact of a disease.

And yet numbers were still 90%+, so what does that say about their views on vaccine usefulness?