Edit: I’d also add of course government entities or government-owned institutions such as schools! I’ve heard that some public high schools in California will require a vaccination card!, which, in my opinion, is quite extreme.
Do you have children? Public schools have had vaccination requirements going back to the middle of the 19th Century. If you live in California, starting before kindegarten students are required to be vaccinated against polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, varicella, Haemophilus influenzae, measles, mumps, and rubella. They also recommend Hep B and meningococcal vaccines but the latter are only required for college students.
https://www.shotsforschool.org/k-12/
This is true in most of the civilized world because vaccines have changed those diseases from something my parents' generation knew as the reason why the neighbor kid died or was crippled for life to something you learn about in history class.
No, I’m a teenager. I didn’t know vaccination requirements were that strict/common. I vaguely remember being asked about it maybe in elementary school but right now I’m in high school and I wasn’t asked any of that to enter (for context, I go to a private high school in Mexico).
https://www.historyofvaccines.org/timeline/all
I would suspect that you would probably have heard about this in a public school and it's also possible that this was handled by your parents without you being aware of it. It's very routine here — my son would have no idea this had happened since his doctor's office sends the records directly to the school nurse.
There's an interesting chart here showing what that looked like in Boston with the death rate falling off as inoculations picked up in the 1700s and then significantly dropping when the first vaccines were used in 1800:
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/special-edition-on-infect...
If you want another interesting bit of history, the Balmis expedition in 1803 is fascinating, too. Smallpox was a huge problem in the New World so Jenner's discovery that cowpox protected against smallpox was of enormous interest but they didn't have an easy way to transport since the trip took longer than the 10-12 days someone would be contagious.
They ended up taking a 22 orphans and infecting them with cowpox two at a time using a sample of the pus from the previous pair, which worked well enough to reach Mexico via the Canary Islands and Puerto Rico, and then from Mexico they repeated the process with 25 new orphans all the way to the Philippines.
A lot of hyperbole for something that’s been here for the better part of a century.
Some vaccines confer life time immunity and others reduce severity.