That’s incorrect. I know that my generation was vaccinated against a more limited set of diseases and has survived pretty well.
“There’s no need for the smartphones. I know that my generation only had landlines to use, and has survived pretty well.”
“Back in the day, smallpox was just a fact of life. Most people lived. What’s the big deal about it anyway, afterall, we survived pretty well, and it’s not like it was holding our society back”
“Why do we need to wash our hands before surgery? We’ve survived pretty well so far like this.”
Just because you have not personally seen someone die from a vaccine preventable disease doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen, or that it’s okay.
Here’s some information about some of the diseases you have mentioned and their associated vaccines.
Hep A is not routinely offered in the UK because it’s considered very low risk there. Even in the US, hep A is usually only something that gets introduced after someone visits a high incidence country. Likely, hep A’s risk in the US is partly because we share a border with a high incidence country. Hep A is spread through contaminated food and water, and it takes an incredibly low amount of virus to cause disease in a person. When you get it as an adult, it can lead to some really serious liver complications, and many cases end up hospitalized. Likely, hep A in the UK is because they don’t expect to get an influx of people coming in who are infected with hep A. By the way, currently, we are experiencing a hepatitis A outbreak of unprecendented scale and duration in San Diego, CA, and Michigan.
The point of the chickenpox vaccine is only partly to protect the kids. The vaccine will also mean that kids who are vaccinated against chickenpox won’t get shingles. Also, when you get it as an adult, it is Bad Times.
Meningococcus vaccine isn’t recommended until you’re 12 years old. The CBA on it has been a bit back and forth, but this one is likely due to cultural things—meningococcus meningitis outbreaks are common when kids from all sorts of different places end up in one place (aka, college, frats (especially!!), team sports, spending a lot of time in close contact with others). Because the course of the disease is real quick (healthy to dead in less than 24 hours) and morbidity is so bad, it’s pretty much recommended due to an abundance of caution. Two years ago, Santa Clara University had a case, and the state responded by mass vaccinating everyone on campus—something like 5,000 people in two days. Such an effort was hideously expensive, but still worth it to the state in terms of morbidity avoided.
Hep B is recommended because 1) there’s no cure for it, and 2) having HBV increases your risk of liver cancer by an insane degree. Infection as a kid usually leads to lifetime infection in a carrier state (or to disease progression), whereas infection as an adult is less likely to lead to chronic illness. It’s really common in East Asians and Africans, and HBV is also considered endemic in Latin American countries. Of your listed countries, the USA is also the most ethnically diverse. Basically, you’re risking putting your kid at risk for liver cancer down the line. Also, HBV costs Medicare a shit ton of money every year in liver transplant/ liver cancer treatment costs.
For your point #2, those aren’t “cultural” differences. It is literally the difference in your risk of getting the disease. TB is endemic and fairly high incidence in pretty much all of Asia. The US recommends against TB because we are a low incidence country and not vaccinating people makes it a whole lot easier for us to detect cases (case detection is through looking for immune reaction against TB. Having a vaccination means you have to either do a more involved test or a chest X-ray).
Every single disease on that list has significant morbidity associated with it, if not now then later in life.
The government also makes cars have seatbelts and airbags; is this because seatbelt and airbag manufacturers lobbied the government? How dare they make you pay for features you don’t want! If you think you’re never going to need that airbag, why should you pay for it?
As a reader of this site, I feel like you should understand that humans are very bad at evaluating small percentages. Under this lens, look at the risk of harm that the vaccination poses to your child, then look at the risk of harm that getting the disease may pose to your child.
The cost benefit analysis you should be doing is how much it will cost you to do this today versus how much pain it’s going to cause your kid in the future.