Anti-vaxxers have been around as long as vaccines themselves
Denying medical science has quite a history
Fear mongering around vaccinations, it turns out, is not just for the Whole Foods set and back-to-the-land extremists. Anti-vaxxers are as old as vaccinations themselves, and there are few medical fear-mongering campaigns so long-lived.
When Edward Jenner introduced vaccination in 1796, there was already a long history of resistance to inoculation, a more primitive form of immunization involving the deliberate introduction of a disease into the body. In the 1700s, no less a thinker than Voltaire lamented the attitude of his fellow Frenchmen towards smallpox inoculations, stating:
“Had inoculation been practiced in France it would have saved the lives of thousands.”
When vaccination replaced the process of inoculation, it removed the well known health risks (around a 2% fatality rate.) Regardless of it being safer, the movement against inoculation seemed to morph into a movement against vaccinations, as if there were no difference.
An illustration from 1808 satirized the anti-vaccine hysteria and fear that Jenner’s bovine serum would trigger “cow mania.”
In 1840, the UK made vaccinations free and government administered. And you’d think a safe, free form of immunization would be popular, but the government still had to pass a compulsory vaccine law for babies in 1853.
An 1856 book called More Words on Vaccination presented what the author claimed to be evidence of the dangers and uselessness of Jenner’s invention. In one part the author asked readers this rhetorical question:
Risum teneais, Latin for “laughter,” is the equivalent of LOL today. Ten years later, in 1866, the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League was founded in the UK, and in America an 1869 issue of The New York Times article asked:
Opposition to vaccines grew in the 1870s, prompting an article in 1875 furiously critiquing the “popular prejudice against vaccination.”
The piece is reminiscent of modern day condemnation of anti-vaxxers. In it the author points out that the technique had been around for nearly 100 years, yet people still feared it. Little did he know, 141 years later the opposition would continue and the “absurd prejudice” would persist.
In 1876 there were even riots in England, after a group of local representatives, elected on an anti-vaccine platform, refused to enforce mandatory vaccines. The Times of London reported that the streets were “thronged by a dense mob, with so menacing an appearance that it was soon evident that a rescue of the prisoners was intended.”
The New York Times reported on an 1879 meeting of doctors who were discussing the creation of an “anti-vaccination society.”
The piece reported that the chairman, at the opening of the meeting said he
“had detested the idea of vaccination for years, and had seen sufficient of the misery which the practice had worked to satisfy him of its evil.”
That same year the first issue of the “Vaccination Inquirer” was published in England by the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination.
Another riot related to mandatory vaccinations broke out in Canada in 1885.
The Montreal Daily Witness reported that when more than a thousand people assembled outside a provincial health board office, its windows were smashed, the doors broken open and there was even reportedly gun fire. Of course, that same year, The New York Times stated flatly:
Nine years later, the Times cited data from Popular Science Monthly showing that in England, amongst a population of 4,000,000, there was just one death from smallpox.
Nevertheless, a century after Jenner introduced vaccination, anti-vaxxers in England won a victory, after a ‘conscious clause’ was added to a vaccination bill allowing parents to opt their children out.
Fast forward 100 years, and in 1996 a vaccine scare erupted in Britain after erroneous research drew a link between vaccines and autism. Subsequently, there was a sharp decline in vaccination rates.
Twenty years later the same doctor who drew the autism link, Andrew Wakefield, is behind “Vaxxed,” the film that was scheduled to appear at the TriBeCa film festival before being pulled. Which is how Robert De Niro, the festival’s founder, ended up on television defending it. Voltaire is turning in his grave.
