Vaccines · A Pediatrician’s Record

Before the Vaccines: What I Saw

The anti-vaccine argument depends on one thing: that nobody remembers what these diseases did. I remember. Here is what I saw on the wards of Detroit, Toronto and northern Ontario — and what has happened to each disease since.

By Terry Polevoy, MD, FRCPC (retired pediatrician) · Posted October 2026 · Personal accounts are my own; every number is drawn from the sources listed at the end.

I first walked hospital wards as a medical student at Wayne State University in Detroit, working after hours at the old Children’s Hospital of Michigan in 1968. I trained in pediatrics at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and I practised in Ontario and the United States until I retired in 2020. Across those years I watched one disease after another empty out of the wards, almost always within a few years of a vaccine arriving.

Most doctors who trained after about 2000 have never seen a child with measles encephalitis, never done a spinal tap on a toddler with Hib meningitis, never walked a winter ward full of babies on intravenous lines for diarrhea. That is not because the diseases went away on their own. It is because of the vaccines.

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Disease	What it did	Vaccine in Canada	What happened next
Measles	Encephalitis, pneumonia, death; years later, SSPE	1963	Eliminated by 1998. Lost again in November 2025 after 5,000+ cases.
Rubella	In pregnancy: babies born deaf, blind or with heart defects	Licensed 1969; programs early 1970s	Eliminated in 2005. Rare cases are imported.
Hib	Meningitis in toddlers; deafness and brain damage in survivors	1988	Invasive disease down about 95%.
Pneumococcus	Meningitis, blood infection, pneumonia	Ontario infant program 2005	Vaccine-type disease down 77% in vaccinated children within five years.
Rotavirus	Severe diarrhea and dehydration in babies	Ontario 2011	Hospitalizations down 71%; in babies under one, 79%.
Hepatitis B	Babies infected at birth: about 90% become lifelong carriers; cirrhosis and liver cancer decades later	School programs in every province, early 1990s	Reported acute cases in Canada fell from 3,001 in 1990 to 582 in 2008. In Quebec, acute infection fell 97%.
RSV	Bronchiolitis; a leading cause of infant hospitalization	Ontario infant program 2024	About 79% effective against hospitalization and 97% against ICU admission in its first season.

The wards, then and now

Every pediatrician of my generation remembers winter on the infectious disease wards: every crib taken, babies in mist tents, IV poles at nearly every bed, and extra cots pushed into the aisles. Those beds held children with the diseases on this page.

An illustration drawn for this page, not a photograph and not a bed count. If you have photographs of these wards that you are free to share, please write to us.

Hib disease in Canada: before and after the vaccine

Around 1989before the vaccine took hold

about 900 cases a year

1999ten years later

about 30

Invasive Haemophilus influenzae type b disease. Source: Public Health Agency of Canada.

How far each disease fell after its vaccine

RubellaCanada; eliminated 2005

eliminated

Acute hepatitis BQuebec, 1990 to 2013

−97%

Hib diseaseCanada, 1989 to 1999

−95%

Pneumococcal diseasevaccine strains, vaccinated Ontario children

−77%

Rotavirus hospitalizationsOntario, after 2011 program

−71%

Each bar measures something slightly different, as labelled; details and sources are in each disease’s section below.

What the empty beds are worth

Nobody has published what Sick Kids spent on those wards. But the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has added up what routine childhood vaccines will prevent among American children born from 1994 to 2023:

508 millionillnesses prevented

32 millionhospital admissions prevented

1.13 milliondeaths prevented

$540 billiondirect medical costs saved (US$)

Counting lost work and other costs to families and society, the savings reach about $2.7 trillion. Source: Zhou F et al., MMWR 73(31), 8 Aug 2024.

The boy on the float plane: pneumococcal meningitis, 1974

Sioux Lookout and Dryden, Ontario · May 1974

In May 1974 I was a senior pediatric resident at Sick Kids, which sent one resident north to Sioux Lookout every month. My wife and I boarded a CN sleeper car at Union Station with our cat. Our two children, not quite three and not quite eight months, stayed behind in Toronto with my in-laws. The trip north took twenty-four hours, and we almost lost the cat, who escaped into the forest on the way to the station.

A boy of about six was brought in by helicopter from a remote First Nations community. I did the spinal tap and looked at the fluid under the microscope myself: Diplococcus pneumoniae. Pneumococcal meningitis.

He needed a children’s hospital, and the nearest was in Winnipeg. We left at first light in a float plane that was nothing like an ambulance. I was the only one caring for him. There was no nurse. The IV bag with his antibiotics hung from a hook in the back seat. Thunderstorms forced us off course; the pilot banked hard to get around them and put down at Dryden instead.

He died as we were landing on the water.

Pneumococcus: the record

The organism I saw under the microscope was renamed Streptococcus pneumoniae in 1974 — the same year.
Residents went north under the University of Toronto Sioux Lookout Program, founded in 1969 and co-founded by Sick Kids pediatrician Harry Bain, which served Cree and Ojibwa communities across northwestern Ontario.

ThenPneumococcus was a leading cause of meningitis and blood infection in young children, with no vaccine for infants.

NowOntario began vaccinating infants in 2005. Between 2008 and 2010, disease from the strains in the vaccine fell 77% in children eligible for it — and 60% in older people who were not, protected by everyone else.

Most young doctors in this province have never done what I did that morning. That is what the vaccine bought.

The boy in the coma: measles encephalitis, 1968

Children’s Hospital of Michigan, Detroit · 1968

I remember standing on rounds in the old Children’s Hospital of Michigan. My favourite senior pediatric resident and the staff physician took us students to the bedside of a sixteen-year-old boy. He was in a coma. He had caught measles.

That was my first patient on rounds, and the first lesson: measles is not a harmless childhood rash. I later saw its slowest and cruellest complication, SSPE, as well.

Measles: the record

Encephalitis (brain inflammation) in about 1 in 1,000 cases. It can leave seizures, deafness or brain injury.
Death in about 1 in 3,000 cases in Canada, most often infants and adults.
SSPE (subacute sclerosing panencephalitis), a fatal brain disease that appears years after an apparent recovery. A 2017 California study found it in 1 in 1,367 children who had measles before age five, and 1 in 609 who had it as infants.
“Immune amnesia.” A 2019 study in Science found measles wiped out 11% to 73% of the antibodies children already had against other infections, leaving them open to diseases they had already beaten.

ThenBefore the vaccine arrived in 1963, Canada reported 10,000 to 90,000 measles cases a year — and most cases were never reported.

NowCanada eliminated measles by 1998 — and lost that status on 10 November 2025, after an outbreak that began in New Brunswick and spread to Ontario and Alberta. More than 5,100 cases were confirmed in 2025, and two premature babies infected before birth died.

Two kinds of rubella children

Detroit and Toronto · late 1960s and early 1970s

The rubella children came in two kinds. Some we saw on the cardiac wards, born with heart defects. Others were blind.

Rubella: the record

Congenital rubella syndrome follows infection in early pregnancy, often from a mild rash the mother barely noticed. It typically brings some combination of deafness, blindness and heart defects.
The last great epidemic, in 1962–65, caused an estimated 12.5 million infections in the United States alone, with 20,000 babies born with congenital rubella syndrome, 11,250 fetal deaths and 2,100 newborn deaths.

ThenRubella came in waves every three to ten years. Canada averaged 37 cases per 100,000 people a year between 1969 and 1973.

NowThe vaccine was licensed in Canada in 1969. Rubella was eliminated here in 2005, and the rare cases since have come from travel abroad.

Mumps

I saw mumps too, in the years just after its vaccine arrived in 1967. Most parents today think of it as swollen cheeks. The Public Health Agency of Canada says complications occur in about 30% of cases: inflammation of the testicles or ovaries, meningitis or encephalitis, and deafness that can be permanent. Unvaccinated people and adults are the most likely to suffer them.

Meningitis: the wards that emptied

Ontario

I remember horrible cases of meningitis that I treated here in Ontario. When we started using the meningitis vaccines, almost all of them disappeared.

Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type b): the record

Before the vaccine, Hib was the main cause of bacterial meningitis in young children. Between 55% and 65% of children with invasive Hib disease developed meningitis.
About 5% of children with Hib meningitis died. Among survivors, 15–20% were left deaf and 10–15% had severe neurological damage.

ThenCanadian Hib meningitis cases rose from about 220 in 1979 to about 510 in 1985. All invasive Hib disease peaked near 900 cases around 1989.

NowThe first vaccine came in 1988. By 1999 Canada was reporting about 30 cases a year, a drop of about 95%.

RSV: every winter, every hospital

Every hospital I trained and worked in

We had huge numbers of children with RSV at almost every hospital where I trained and worked. We had no vaccine yet.

RSV: the record

Almost every child catches RSV by age two, and it is a leading cause of hospitalization in infants.
For half a century there was nothing to prevent it in healthy babies. Ontario began offering every newborn a long-acting protective antibody, nirsevimab (Beyfortus), for the 2024–25 season.

ThenFull RSV wards every winter, in every children’s hospital, for my entire career.

NowIn its first season, a study at seven pediatric hospitals in Ontario and Quebec found it about 79% effective against RSV hospitalization and 97% effective against admission to intensive care.

The diarrhea wards

The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto

At Sick Kids I saw all sorts of children suffering from dehydration from diarrhea, because we had no vaccine yet. We had diarrhea wards.

Rotavirus: the record

Before vaccination, about two-thirds of hospital admissions for gastroenteritis in Canada were children under two. Rotavirus was the leading cause.

ThenA winter fixture of every pediatric hospital, filling wards with dehydrated infants.

NowOntario began vaccinating babies in 2011. Rotavirus hospitalizations fell 71%, emergency visits 68%, and hospitalizations of babies under one 79%. Older children and even adults were hospitalized less, protected by the vaccinated babies around them.

Hepatitis B: the first vaccine against a cancer

Hepatitis B rarely filled a children’s ward the way measles or RSV did. Its damage came later. A baby infected at birth usually looks well, carries the virus for life, and may die of cirrhosis or liver cancer as an adult. That is why the hepatitis B vaccine is often called the first vaccine against cancer.

Hepatitis B: the record

The younger the child, the worse the odds. Infants infected at birth have about a 90% chance of lifelong infection; children aged one to five, 25–50%; adults, 1–5%.
Over several decades, 20–25% of chronic carriers develop cirrhosis and about 5–6% develop liver cancer.
Taiwan began vaccinating every newborn in 1984. Liver cancer in children aged 6 to 14 fell from 0.70 per 100,000 (1981–86) to 0.36 (1990–94).

ThenIn 1990, Canada reported 3,001 acute cases, a rate of 10.8 per 100,000.

NowEvery province began vaccinating children at school in the early 1990s. By 2008 reported cases had fallen to 582. In Quebec, acute infection fell 97% from 1990 to 2013, and no child under ten has been reported with it since 2010.

Did you see these diseases too?

If you are a retired doctor, nurse or therapist, or a parent who lived through one of these illnesses with your child, your memory is evidence. The people now telling young parents these were mild childhood illnesses were not on those wards. Write to drpolevoy@yahoo.com. With your permission, we will add your account to this page, with names and anything identifying removed.

And if you want to check what the vaccines are, and what they are not, see our list of trusted sources.

A note on privacy: No patient on this page is identified. Ages, places and years are given only as precisely as needed to tell what happened.

Sources

Pneumococcus name change: “Streptococcus pneumoniae,” Wikipedia (renamed 1974).
Sioux Lookout Program: “Harry Bain,” Wikipedia; University of Toronto Archives, U of T Sioux Lookout Program series.
Ontario pneumococcal program: “Have changing pneumococcal vaccination programmes impacted disease in Ontario?” Vaccine, 2013 (PubMed 23597716).
Measles complications: HealthLink BC, “Measles” (encephalitis 1 in 1,000; death 1 in 3,000).
SSPE: Wendorf KA et al., “Subacute Sclerosing Panencephalitis: The Devastating Measles Complication That Might Be More Common Than Previously Estimated,” Clinical Infectious Diseases 2017;65(2):226–232.
Immune amnesia: Mina MJ et al., Science, 2019; Harvard Gazette, “How measles wipes out the body’s immune memory,” 31 Oct 2019.
Measles in Canada, pre-vaccine: Canadian Center for Vaccinology, “How vaccines changed history for these three diseases in Canada,” 2025.
Measles in Canada, 2025: CIDRAP, “Canada loses measles elimination status after record year of outbreaks,” 10 Nov 2025.
Rubella: CDC, MMWR 54(11), 2005, “Achievements in Public Health: Elimination of Rubella and Congenital Rubella Syndrome”; Public Health Agency of Canada, CCDR 50(7/8), 2024, “Congenital rubella syndrome, a case series.”
Mumps: Public Health Agency of Canada, “Mumps: Symptoms and treatment.”
Hib: Public Health Agency of Canada, “Haemophilus influenzae disease: For health professionals.”
RSV: University of Calgary, “Immunization to prevent RSV in infants reduced ICU admissions by 97 per cent,” 14 Sept 2026 (SPRINT-KIDS, JAMA Network Open); Contagion Live, “Ontario launches universal RSV protection program for infants,” 1 Aug 2024.
Hepatitis B in Canada: Public Health Agency of Canada, “Hepatitis B infection in Canada”; “Dramatic reduction in hepatitis B through school-based immunization without a routine infant program in a low endemicity region,” BMC Infectious Diseases, 2015 (Quebec data).
Hepatitis B and childhood liver cancer, Taiwan: Chang MH et al., “Universal hepatitis B vaccination in Taiwan and the incidence of hepatocellular carcinoma in children,” New England Journal of Medicine 336:1855–1859, 1997 (PubMed 9197213).
Cost of illness prevented: Zhou F et al., “Health and Economic Benefits of Routine Childhood Immunizations in the Era of the Vaccines for Children Program — United States, 1994–2023,” MMWR 73(31), 8 Aug 2024.
Rotavirus: Public Health Ontario, “Ontario rotavirus hospitalizations drop 71 percent after launch of infant vaccine program,” May 2016.