Did you think the anti-vaccine movement was bequeathed to the world when it fell out in Jenny McCarthy’s afterbirth? Oh no, we’ve been fucking up the gift of avoiding the entirely avoidable for an annoyingly long time.
Today’s Moment of Science… The early history of the anti-vaccine movement.
Humanity’s earliest direct attempts at virus prevention were some high stakes fuck-around-and-find-out experiments with smallpox. Variolation, history’s rudimentary vaccine predecessor, existed in a few forms for about a millenium. Sterile needle to infringe on your freedom? Nope, but you do have the options of material from a deadened pox either inhaled or rubbed into an open wound.
It was easy to be skeptical about the primitive version of the ‘dead virus prevents virus’ racket. If all went perfectly, material for variolation would come from the nearly healed pox of a patient with Variola minor, the far less deadly variant of smallpox. This could induce mild disease symptoms before leading to lifelong immunity.
However, this was done hundreds of years ago. Whoopsiedoodles of smallpox proportions happened.
Sometimes doctors didn’t do the procedure properly, not conferring any immunity. Sometimes chickenpox could be mistaken for the illness, or worse, a case of Variola major was mistaken for Variola minor. It was easy enough to mistake one pox for another, take a sample when it was a bit too alive, and cause an itsy smallpox outbreak when trying to prevent one.
In a time before germ theory, variolation dropped your chances of this monster killing you from 30% down to about 1-2%. Which still presented enough risk from a new scary technology for people to goddamn riot.
A smallpox outbreak hit Boston in 1721. At that point, word of variolation hadn’t arrived in North America. Well, not via white people at least. An enslaved man named Onesimus explained to his owner- a minister named Mather- that he’d both had and not had smallpox somehow. He explained the inoculation procedure. Initially suspicious, Mather became a variolation evangelist.
To which Bostonians of the eighteenth century said “it was the slave’s idea? We’d rather fucking die,” and chucked a bomb through Mather’s window. In that outbreak, one in seven of those who weren’t inoculated and caught smallpox died. Of the comparatively few who braved variolation, only about one in forty died.
Variolation was slow to catch on in the colonies, even outlawed in some places because of the association with starting outbreaks. In 1768-1769, there were anti-inoculation riots in Virginia. Even though a legal form of inoculation was used, angry mobs burned down houses and forced the recently inoculated to walk to the outskirts of town to finish recovering.
Aah, Americans: anti-preventative medicine since before… America.
Quirk of nature, immunity to cowpox could confer immunity to smallpox without that whole messy ‘risk of dying in miserable pain’ thing. You’d expect that when the method of inoculation didn’t come with a chance of fatality, maybe attitudes would change. You’d be expecting too much.
The Vaccination Act of 1853 in the UK was pretty strict and said “hey smallpox is a super bummer, so vaccinate your little copypastes or we’re fining you.” This led to violent riots across the country, because we cannot just accept lifesaving technology. An Anti-Vaccination League popped up, with similar groups establishing themselves across Europe.
At one point in the 1870s, when the rest of Sweden was about 90% vaccinated, Stockholm was overrun by anti-vaccine hysteria and had dropped to a vaccination rate of 40%. Because why do we need vaccines if nobody seems to get smallpox anymore, huh? Then a smallpox epidemic hit in 1874, and Stockholm residents were snorting cowpox vaccines like friggin cocaine.
A major lawsuit sprung up in Massachusetts in 1905 over mandatory smallpox vaccines. It being a different fucking time, the Supreme Court ruled that mandatory vaccines were just fucking dandy with them, which I’m bringing up for no reason whatsoever with regard to current events.
“But Mrs. Auntie SciBabe,” I hear you think, “what about today’s anti-vax movement? HAVE YOU NO RANT?”
I rant, therefore I am. I’ll tell you my version of that another day. For today, you should read my friend James Fell’s article on disgraced former doctor, Andrew Wakefield: https://bit.ly/3vsGtyD
This has been your Moment of Science, not entirely convinced that we will ever get over vaccine hesitancy as a species.
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