Somebody needs to ask RFK Jr this:

[haele]

80. Mind you, infant mortality is different to childhood in general mortality.

In my mom's generation (born 1939) nearly everyone knew a family with at least one child that became disabled by a disease or died of a disease before 16.
She actually got a mild form of tuberculosis in the late 40's; her parents thought it was bronchitis. She still has the live titers that show she had the disease instead of perhaps an odd reaction to the immunization she got when some school districts made it compulsory in the 1950's.
I got infant scarlet fever; there still isn't vaccine for it so far as I know.
When I was 5, I played with a neighbor kid who died of measles; later, went to school with another who had what now seems to have been permanent neuropathy in the extremities after being sick with.German measles when he was 10; went to first grade with one whose toddler sister died of tetanus, and one who went blind from a seriously bad case of chicken pox. And that was all during in the 1960's and early 1970's (ancidotally from experience in large population samples, which means the stats may change looking at smaller population clusters).

So yeah vaccines have done the significantly heavy lifting knocking down infant and childhood mortality.

Haele