Precious Roy wrote:
People need people to survive. If you allow a large segment of the population to die off to a preventable disease, the surviving population will struggle ...
While I agree with your conclusions, your logic is flawed. With >7B people on earth, a reduction in population size would reduce competition for limited resources. People would struggle less, not more, if the global population was halved. How do we know? Because we've been there.
Of course, people can change their own carrying capacity, so density-dependent population growth is very different in humans and let's say squirrels. The data suggest that until about 1970 (when there were about half as many people on earth as there are now), technology improved faster than population size grew, so that the population was further and further below the earth's carry capacity for humans, despite growing exponentially.
Beginning about 1970 with a population around 3.7B, the data suggest that the earth's human population began growing FASTER than the rate of increase in carrying capacity. There are limits on technological solutions to supporting an infinite number of humans on a single planet.
We see the ramifications all around us, both in environmental terms, and in the switch from easy, steady growth of developed economies to former powerhouse economies struggling to maintain the prosperity that their parents obtained with relative ease.
Oh, and in anti-vaccination paranoia too.