The long history of anti vaccination sentiment

Post Reply New Topic

More Americans are getting the Covid-19 vaccine, but a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that 32 percent of people in the United States remain unlikely to get vaccinated against the virus. The newest group of vaccine doubters are parents of children who just received approval to get the shots. A poll in late October from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that fewer than 1 in 3 American parents want to vaccinate their 5- to 11-year-olds.

Vaccine hesitancy has always gone hand in hand with vaccines, meaning the scope of the problem is more deep-seated and intractable than many understand — even as social media is used to spread such sentiments further than ever before. That means the country almost certainly can’t rely on soft tools such as education and incentives alone to get sufficient numbers of people vaccinated.

The Chinese practiced smallpox inoculation as early as 1500 by inhaling powder made from the crusts of smallpox scabs in order to protect themselves from the disease. That was nearly 300 years before Edward Jenner founded vaccinology in the West in 1796 by taking the fluid from a cowpox blister and scratching it into the skin of a patient. There was such staunch resistance by individuals who were skeptical, given the many medical quacks of the day and their fears about endangering their children, that the English government made Jenner’s inoculation procedure mandatory for its citizens at the beginning of the next century.

When these innovations landed in the New World, they brought fears about the practice with them. "Since the founding of the American colonies, anti-vaccine sentiments have been widely expressed," notes Dr. Peter J. Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.

As one early example, he pointed to an instance in which a Puritan minister and his physician were attacked in Boston for trying to use inoculation to combat the smallpox epidemic of the early 1720s. The Washington Post described the attack as sparked by “Fear of science, suspicion of the ruling elite, and a belief that medicine might meddle with God’s will.”

“Interestingly, the points anti-vaxxers made in the 1800s are not much different from points being made today,” notes Elizabeth Jacobs, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Arizona.

Vaccine superstitions particularly track with a lack of trust in government, according to Janet Golden, an emeritus history professor at Rutgers University–Camden. Though these superstitions have been present in every American century, political trust has been in sharp decline in modern America.

The upheavals of the 1960s, the fiascos of the Vietnam War and Watergate in the 1970s, and the anti-government movement under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s all fed this sentiment, which was then intensified by the tea party and Trumpism.

I still don’t understand how the same people who peddle Covid anti-vax propaganda were nowhere to be found when it was polio, smallpox, and MMR.

Do they want more lockdowns? As I recall, there were people in Michigan so opposed to those they were willing to kidnap their governor.