Bananas and eggs  while you’re getting polio
 
392 people died in the UK in the swine flu epidemic of 2009-2010. 
UK 'in grip of worst flu season since 2011' - BBC News (2018)
 
1523 people died of flu in 2018.
Influenza deaths in 2018, 2019 and 2020 - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)
 
72,128 people died with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19 in 2020.
COVID-19 confirmed deaths in England (to 31 December 2020): report - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
 
Of course this has nothing to do with vaccination.
 
Interestingly, scarlet fever vanished before coming back without a vaccine, which seems to be because it’s a bacteria not a virus and so treatable with antibiotics.
 
Scarlet fever is a bacterial infection caused by a Group A Streptococcus. It's characterised by a sore throat, fever, headaches, swollen lymph nodes, "strawberry tongue", and a rash.
It may not sound terrible based on those symptoms, but it was responsible for 36,000 registered deaths in the first decade of the 20th century in England and Wales, and was a leading cause of child mortality.
There's no vaccine for scarlet fever. Once contracted, it's treated quite easily with a course of antibiotics, which - at least partially - contributed to the disease's decline in developed countries after about 1945.
 
Diphtheria is also a bacterial infection.
 
The detection of polio has brought loons out in force.  When my mum was 6, she spent six weeks in an isolation hospital with scarlet fever.  All of them eradicated by vaccination, the dread diseases of the past, polio, measles, diphtheria, smallpox, whooping cough.   Smallpox was so completely eradicated that they stopped vaccinations in 1971.  This is unfortunate, not because we are about to be devastated by smallpox but because the smallpox jab also guards against monkeypox.   Measles met the WHO criteria for eradication a few years ago but there have been a handful too many  cases since.  The measles vaccine was produced in 1963, too late to stop me being seriously ill with measles in 1964. Memory is naturally hazy, but I think it was an epidemic; virtually all my class had it too.  One of the features of Covid rarely mentioned is that the situation of ‘lots of people dying or at least being very sick from  something nasty’ had become virtually unknown.  We have been told to be kind to anti-vaxxers, to woo them rather than treat them as the enemies of civilization.  If these toxic, vocal, subnormal fucktards gain the upper hand, all the killers of the past will happily return, deprived areas in particular cesspools of disease. 
 
The 6-in-1 vaccine is 1 of the first vaccines your baby will have.
It's given as a single injection to protect your baby against 6 serious childhood conditions:
diphtheria hepatitis B Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type b) polio tetanus whooping cough (pertussis)  
6-in-1-vaccine-overview - NHS (www.nhs.uk)
 
NHS vaccinations and when to have them - NHS (www.nhs.uk)
 
Vaccination timeline table from 1796 to present - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
 
What this amounts to is the putrid spectacle of people screaming vaccination is evil who were themselves vaccinated against everything in sight and who therefore did not die of diphtheria when they were 10.   
 
But then of course this is a civilized country and a lot of it is driven from the good ole USofA:
 
Get the Cost of Immunizations Covered
Depending on your income, age, and health insurance coverage, you or your children may be eligible for free vaccinations.
Learn about the Vaccines for Children program (VFC). See if your family qualifies for the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Find out if you are eligible for Medicare or Medicaid-covered vaccinations. Search for a local health center that can give immunizations at a cost based on your income Vaccines and Immunizations | USAGov
 
In other words it’s a sweat. As evidenced by the yowls of backwoodsmen some Americans appear to believe that vaccines were not previously heard of prior to Covid and are thus clearly a plot.
 
The history is interesting:
 
Smallpox is an ancient disease, likely emerging when humans first started to settle into cities. Egyptian mummies have evidence of smallpox scars and it was likely first described in text by Thucydides in 430 B.C.E as the Plague of Athens. Mortality rates can reach as high as 80%. Astute scholars in China as early as 1000 C.E. noticed, however, that if you recovered from smallpox, you never redeveloped the disease and developed the practice of variolization as a rudimentary vaccine.
The first formal vaccine for smallpox was developed in the 1790s when English physician Edward Jenner noticed that exposure to a less serious version of the disease, cowpox, could protect against smallpox. When Dr. Jenner developed his vaccine, it was initially met with skepticism. Some decried it as being opposed to God’s will. Others played on the public’s misunderstanding of the vaccine and fears of putting foreign substances into one’s body by publishing cartoons satirizing people morphing into cows after being vaccinated (sound familiar?). Nevertheless, as its efficacy was demonstrated, scientific and public support grew, and vaccination began to spread, first in Europe and then around the world.
It wasn’t long before the United Kingdom and the US introduced laws mandating smallpox
Historic cartoon opposing mandatory
vaccination of school children
against smallpox
vaccination—and organizations rose up to protest those laws. Yet despite two centuries of opposition, the vaccine would prove to be one of humanity’s greatest success stories. In the early 1950s, smallpox was gone in North America and Europe, and by 1980, it was eradicated from Earth, thanks to an intensive campaign led by the World Health Organization. Today, no one need be vaccinated for smallpox nor fear this disease that had plagued humanity for over 10,000 years. Empowered, scientists began to turn their eyes towards exterminating the next virus.
DPT and MMR -- Misinformation and Fraud
From the 1920s-1970s, many new vaccines were introduced that dramatically reduced the rates of devastating childhood diseases. In the 1950s, polio, with its ability to paralyze and kill children, became the disease of most concern to the public. The significant reduction in polio’s prevalence following the introduction of the Salk vaccine in 1954 was a strong testament to its efficacy and helped to bolster the public’s acceptance of vaccines.
In 1982, a news documentary called “DPT: Vaccine Roulette” began to change attitudes. It highlighted stories of parents and doctors claiming that children developed seizures and permanent brain damage after the diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus (DPT) vaccine. Seizures were a rare side effect of the vaccine, but no long-term effects from the vaccine had been demonstrated. The documentary took research out of context to attack the safety of the vaccine, leading to decreased vaccination rates and lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers. The litigation nearly destroyed the American vaccine manufacturing industry and lead to the creation of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act in 1986, a no-fault system established by the federal government where claims of harm from vaccines could be filed.
In 1998, one of the most infamous studies in scientific history was published in The Lancet, a prominent medical journal. British physician Andrew Wakefield claimed that the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine caused inflammatory bowel disease and autism. He specifically believed that the live attenuated measles vaccine reacted with the intestines to allow for toxic, autism-causing substances to enter the blood stream and eventually the brain. The work was quickly criticized, the Lancet retracted the article, other journals investigated the integrity of the research, and even many of the co-authors of the paper agreed that claiming a link between vaccination and autism was a step too far, unaware of Wakefield’s true intent. It was eventually revealed that Wakefield had been funded by lawyers who were working with the parents of the children in the study to try to find a reason to sue the vaccine manufacturers. Investigations made it clear Wakefield was a liar and a fraud, that he deliberately picked data to support the lawyers’ case, and falsified other data for financial gain. He lost his medical license but continues to stand by the original study. He remains a vocal anti-vaccine advocate today.
Despite two decades of medical literature showing there is no link between the development of autism and vaccination, many still believe this myth. Public figures, from actress Jenny McCarthy to former president Donald Trump latched onto the study and used their platforms to repeat vaccine misinformation. The rise of social media sites has created echo chambers where these views are shared and reinforced.
The effect of this has been alarming—a clear and dramatic downward effect on vaccination rates since the Wakefield study. In the UK, it took two decades for vaccination rates to recover. During this time there were 12,000 cases of measles, hundreds of hospitalizations, and at least three measles deaths. Europe experienced a 4-fold increase in measles cases and 35 deaths in 2017 alone.
New Outbreaks in the United States
Impacts of this study and the rise of the Anti-Vaccine Movement also hit the United States. In 2000, the USA declared measles eradicated, but since then there have been over 3,000 reported measles cases in the United States. This has coincided with a rise in the national rate of vaccination exemptions due to personal or religious views. In California, the exemption rate exceeded 20% and directly lead to a measles outbreak at Disneyland, prompting the state to pass a new law removing parents’ ability to opt out of vaccinating their children due to personal beliefs. In 2017, an outbreak of ~70 measles cases in Minnesota resulted in over 8,000 people being exposed. The Minnesota outbreak was tied directly to non-vaccination rates as high as 42% in Somali-American communities, due to a perceived link between autism and the vaccination. 2019 was the worst year for measles in the United States since 1992, with 1,282 cases reported, the vast majority among non-vaccinated people.
Vaccine Hesitancy: A Story as Old as Vaccines Themselves | Eureka blog (criver.com)
 
OK, who sold my name, my street and my phone number to some goons wanting to sell me loft insulation for the loft I don’t have.  They are working in my very street right now, you understand. 
 
I shall never know.  There is no way I can know without every company with which I have dealt, all supposedly reputable, being forced to disclose every last detail of its operations.
 
Of course they’re getting desperate.  Not only consumers but also retailers are being sent mad by the cost of living crisis, frantically trying to sell you what you don’t want and they don’t have.  Item, a cotton cardigan, which one might purchase for this thing called summer we are currently having. Unless you are of a rapidly dwindling number of people who can afford to have the heating on as soon as there is the slightest nip in the air, it is not something you will buy to see you through the winter, not least because it is far from cheap and something substantially warmer  can be had for the price.    This cotton cardigan in a new colour proudly displayed  among many that are actually available now is also flagged: it  isn’t going to be in stock until the end of September. 
 
There are many reasons to shop at Ocado.  One is I don’t eat very much and like what I do eat not to be crap.  Any flavour at all is getting to be a bonus in a world of ‘perfect pears’ which might as well be made of papier mache.  The taste of the food in question is a cause for ecstasy.  Always have been a fruit bat.  Bowls of fruit redolent with flavour and dripping with juice, glasses of ice cold milk, the two combined in shakes,  that’s my summer settled
 
Thus the word ‘tasty’ so beloved of on-line reviews.  I have a theory that the reason curry took off, the reason for the popularity of the vast array of pasta sauces on sale, is people are desperate for flavour.  Once upona flavour streamed from the simple new potato.  I have tried ‘Jerseys’ from a trio of supermarkets.  They were all tasteless crap.  What the hell do they do to food, let alone supposedly organic food, to completely strip it of flavour?   Do I believe they really were Jersey Royals?  Ah, a can of worms indeed. 
 
Another Ocado treat  is their excellent stock-taking.  They tell you at checkout if something is not in stock, not  in an email three hours before the delivery is due, thus possibly ruining what you thought you were going to have for dinner.    A third is their offers are excellent.  A fourth in time of plague is certainly their technology, robots cheerfully gathering up one’s shopping instead of humans handling and breathing (coughing, sneezing) over it. It only takes a little imagination to shudder quietly at the thought of the order being assembled from goods on the shop floor. Yes, packaging can carry Covid, not for long, but just long enough for it to get onto your hands. Yet another is their Website, though not quite as lean and clean as it was, does not leave you screaming and climbing the walls.  It’s the algorithm, stupid.
 
A search on ‘organic bacon’ at Ocado produces five varieties of organic bacon.  ‘767 results for ‘organic bacon’’, carols the Sainsbury’s site.  It might be an offence under the Misrepresentation of Goods Act if it wasn’t pure farce. 
Organic carrots Organic bananas Unorganic bacon Organic cucumber Unorganic bacon Organic milk You get the gist.  Actually it probably is an offence under the MGA: a customer could make a reasonable presumption that the bacon was organic.    The poor little algorithm can only cope with one word at a time, it seems.  But this would be monumentally unhelpful to anyone shopping by brand, including so-called unbranded, which here means Sainsbury’s.  ‘Sainsbury’s tomatoes’ does indeed generate Sainsbury’s tomatoes, both tinned and fresh, and ‘Heinz soup’ Heinz soup.
 
This is a good one.

So is this:

So now we all have two phones.  Alternatively of course we all live with someone else who also has a phone. It must be said that some people do have two phones, for instance one for work, one for personal, but that is distinct from a requirement to possess two phones stipulated amazingly enough by an ISP and retailer of phones.

Also to be  added is that following a recent power failure at the time of which everything was fortunately fully charged it did occur to me to get a second standby phone always fully charged. It was a fuse.  I cannot reach my fuse box and needed to ask someone to pop round and flip the switch.
 
An emergency of any kind bar 999 is not a good time to try to top up and find you are required to have a second phone. Don’t you have a contract, dear?  Actually no, not for making calls. 
 
I don’t feel the need to carry my phone around the house with me.  Maybe that makes me a minority of one, but it usually sits on the table next to sofa or bed and I have zero desire to have it accompany me into the kitchen or the loo or when I see if I have any post or take out the garbage.  Lifting the nearly full water container of the dehumidifier.  Arranging my laundry on the airer.  Naturally poised to dart across the room.  People  really really have their phones within reach 24/7?   Why do I think this model is derived from teens who don’t actually do any household tasks?   
 
It doesn’t actually usually matter if you miss a call from a friend or relation because you can ring right back.  When dealing with The Organization it’s critical. Certainly you can ring right back but you will  not get through to whomever called you.  You merely get caught in a loop of being told X will be asked to call you back, which X will have done anyway, with the mild dread of missing the next call and so forever round in the loop.  Therefore keep phone with me at all times but it still   means I can’t go for a walk.  Doing anything other than simply talking can be awkward verging on impossible on a street corner, referring back to a receipt, checking a date.   If in the lovely sunshine I can even see the phone properly to answer it.  With my luck I’d be in the middle of crossing a road.  Then there is the delicate question of at what point is it appropriate to call back and say no-one’s rung me  and try to insist on being put through to the folks who haven’t rung me, which would prove a massive fail if for instance I learned they only work three days a week.  Still, at least I’d learn which three days.  Or of course the team is blighted by Covid. Hallo, people, this is your coronavirus speaking.  No, I have not gone away. 
 
There is a telephone fetish, the near universal rejection of text and email, which are vastly more convenient to the patient or customer, and of course cheaper.  Yeah, yeah, press 1, press 17, press 239 and just hang on in there because you have absolutely nothing better to do.  Every Website has a Contact Us page.  Fewer supply an email address to do that very thing.  Just don’t mention Chat.  The average Chat bot is a recipe for a heart attack.   You end up in tears not because your problem is grievous but because the bloody thing does not understand simple words of English.   While the companies sit preening themselves at how accessible they are.  Probably.