When half of the people who have lived stopped living because of a mosquito I think we are firmly in the 'give it a shot and see what happens' territory. As long as you don't kill half the population it was a success.
I can't see anywhere the cite(s) proving this fantabulous claim. Without that, we can assume that it came out of thin air for dramatic effect.
Mosquitoes kill a lot of people, but not "half of the humanity". One on each two persons that you know in your city are killed by mosquitoes? Seriously? Why are we still focused on car crashes and heart strokes?
Of the people killed by malaria, 95% are Africans. One of each two people in Africa are killed by malaria?. World Health Organization says that in 2024 there was 282 million cases of malaria and of those, more than 281 millions survived [1]. This is not a fifty percent of mortality in my book.
Malaria mortality is a 2% in the worse locations, 0.5-1% in most of Africa and lower in India or China.
https://www.who.int/teams/global-malaria-programme/reports/w...
We were less than 0.2 billions in 200 AC, one billion in 1804, two in 1927 and we are 8.3 billions now.
For most of the 8 millions of years walking on this planet we were like "a couple thousands of people" or so, just a blip in the entire history. The impact of this long dead people on statistics comprising our whole species would be negligible, or really low at best.
Pro tip: there have been a lot of people before the current ones.
Other people in this thread are asking for actual scientific papers and articles. Not some guys military history book with the mosquito shoved in.
“The mosquito has killed more people than any other cause of death in human history. Statistical extrapolation situates mosquito-inflicted deaths approaching half of all humans that have ever lived.”
So once again its just some bull shit.