eli5: How was smallpox eradicated but other diseases are significantly harder to completely get rid of?
In: Biology
I’ll add another thing that nobody else has mentioned: survivorship bias and lack of personal experience with the diseases. In many cases now it’s been 50+ years since we’ve begun vaccinating for a disease (like measles), so most everyone alive either never had contact with it, or was a small child when they got it and was unaware of other children that died of it. They simply remember being sick and then getting better. Most people old enough to remember their children dying of diseases like measles aren’t around anymore so we have a population that has no idea of how devastating these illnesses can be, that thinks “well I survived it so it can’t have been that bad” (you see them saying the same thing about seatbelts in cars). So it becomes much easier to convince people that these diseases weren’t actually a big deal and that vaccines are actually worse/more dangerous than getting the disease.
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