Paul Dicken

Sep 20, 2023 | lawliberty.org | Igor Tulchinsky |Christopher Mason |Paul Dicken |Tyler Hummel

Vaccination was introduced to Europe and North America in the early 1700s. It was met with considerable skepticism (if not outright hostility), and explicitly banned in some countries. The process, however, was finally redeemed through statistics. In 1766 the Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernouilli extracted the relevant rates of susceptibility and fatality from census records and predicted an average improvement of 14 years of life expectancy for those inoculated against smallpox.