I was a little shocked to learn recently, those chimney sweep boys actually crawled up the chimneys to clean them. I always figured they were just shoving those ass big broom things in the chimney, but no they actually had the little orphan boys scramble up them with a hand broom. Sometimes they'd get stuck and they'd have to tie a rope to them to yank them out, or they'd run into a hot patch of the chimney and get burned. It was so bad even people of the time began condemning it as a horrible inhumane practice and began passing regulations on chimney cleaning to do away with it.

Was hacking my lungs up for a solid month

AFAIK you can actually have that happen, too. The coughing can not only break ribs and causes vomiting like the other user said, it can cause so much damage to your lungs they start to bleed and you cough up bits of lung tissue.

Absolutely horrifying stuff. Even worse when it's small children and babies who get it. Makes me absolutely enraged we have a fucking miracle cure but people refuse to take it because of some bullshit they saw on Facebook.

I got pneumonia when I was a kid cuz I feel in a stream and inhaled water.

If it's as bad as that then, yeah that shit does sound like it sucks.

probably some really strong state-wide public health program to promote and provide the vaccine easily.

shit like this is a lay up if a public health administrator is allowed to run it and gets the backing of other state agencies and communications. mass vaccination programs are pretty straightforward to execute. they manage to pull them off in totally screwed underdeveloped countries, and Mississippi for all its problems has reliable roads and electricity.

so really, if whatever political project is running the state is fairly secure and doesn't need some 3% bump from the pro-nurgle crank faction to claim more power, they can just go ahead and roll out a program and not worry about blowback, because most people literally just need a quick, convenient, and no-cost avenue to get their immunizations updated. they need to know where to go, what to say, and when to be there.

hesitancy is a real phenomenon, of course, but i think the general decline has been about the shyness of state public health admins to run a big promotional campaign and potentially lose their career because the political environment they are in is full of uncertainty and opportunistic assholes who will come after them.

No religious exemptions, and very strict medical exemptions for children going into any school receiving state funding. It's atypically strict by US standards, and so has some of the highest vaccination rates. Not sure why it ended up that way, must be a historical fluke from a time when vaccines were not a controversial political issue.