Scepticism about vaccines may seem like a new movement that has been gaining popularity recently. In fact, it’s probably much older than you think.
Since the beginning of human history, our species has been attacked by terrible viruses and deadly epidemics. Smallpox, a viral disease characterised by a rash of painful pustules all over the body, was one of the deadliest diseases, killing around 300 million people in the 20th century alone.
The disease killed about a third of those infected. Among the survivors, a third were left blind. Nearly all were scarred for life. Neither wealth nor geography protects against disease. Among its victims were Emperor Joseph I of Austria, King Louis I of Spain, Queen Mary II of England, King Louis XV of France and the Russians were immune to smallpox infection. Jenner named the procedure after the Latin word for cow, “vacca,” and so the first vaccine was born.
“The annihilation of smallpox, the worst punishment of the human race, must be the end result of this practice,” Jenner wrote in 1801.
And he was right. In 1980, after a decade-long public health campaign that included mass vaccination, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared smallpox eradicated. It remains the only infectious disease with which this result has been achieved.
A number of other vaccines have since been developed against other diseases, from influenza to human papillomavirus infections that cause certain cancers to the Sars-COV-2 virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic. Over the past 50 years, according to one recent study, vaccines state.
So is this a recent phenomenon – is there as much distrust of vaccines as vaccinations themselves? Why are relatively small but vociferous sections of society protesting against them? And how have these arguments developed?
Let’s look at the long and strange history of the anti-vaccination movement.
In the early 1800s, a series of controlled experiments by Jenner and other doctors quickly showed that vaccination was extremely effective and provided immunity against smallpox in 95% of those vaccinated. Health authorities around the world took steps to spread them.
In Britain, a series of Vaccination Acts passed in 1840, 1853 and 1871 made immunisation of children first free and then compulsory.
But almost immediately another problem arose: anti-vaccination leagues began to spring up all over the country.
They;, anti-vaccination tracts, books and even periodicals, including The Anti-vaccinator (1869) and The Vaccination Questionnaire (1879).
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When we talk about the ‘anti-vaccination movement’, we might imagine public protests, court cases or provocative statements about the Covid-19 vaccine. But the history of anti-vaccination protests is long and includes anti-vaccination riots in England in the 1850s, Canada in the 1880s and America in the 1890s. In 1905 in Boston in the US, resistance to vaccination led to mass protests and a Supreme Court case that ruled that mandatory vaccinations were constitutional.
Interestingly, resistance to the very idea of vaccination existed even before vaccines were invented. Variolation was a precursor to modern immunisation, which used material from smallpox patients to induce a mild reaction and acquire 1) This is not a logical argument – arsenic and uranium are completely natural, but hardly appropriate at breakfast.
Some critics also believed that the vaccine might not only affect the defence against the disease, but also somehow alter the body itself. In one 1802 cartoon, patients who had been vaccinated against smallpox turned into cows.
That was one source of the claim that “vaccines permanently alter your DNA,” says surgeon David Gorski, editor of Science-Based Medicine.
“They obviously didn’t know about DNA back then, but the idea that vaccines somehow change who you are is an anti-vaccine stampede that goes back a long way,” he explains.
There have also been widespread claims that vaccines are poison. Better to sit in a cell for criminals than to poison an infant – that was the message on one of the banners, which often the second perspective is to disprove incorrect claims as early as possible by providing science-based data. This is easier said than done, because the enemy in this game operates by rules that are usually not scientific.
But there were other reasons for anti-vaccination campaigns. One of the biggest arguments was concerns about bodily autonomy and individual freedoms.
In fact, the anti-vaccination leagues emerged not only as a response to vaccination, but also as a response to medical science in general, says Nobel Prize-winning vaccinologist Peter Gotez, professor of paediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, US.
It was “a health freedom movement that began in the early 1800s as an alternative to scientific medicine,” says Gotez.
The argument for “personal freedom” in particular seemed particularly compelling to the people of Stockholm in Sweden – only 40 per cent of them had been vaccinated against smallpox in 1873, while in the rest of the country 90 per cent of the population was vaccinated.
The following year, a massive smallpox epidemic broke out in Sweden, resulting in a death rate of 330 per 10,000 Stockholm residents – more than 10 times higher than the rest of the country. Since then, the number of people seeking vaccinations has skyrocketed.
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Many public health figures of 20.5 people per 10,000 population have been infected. But they ignored the fact that health workers were already vaccinated, and a disproportionate share of cases were children – two-thirds of cases in Leicester.
Instead, in London, where the majority of the population was vaccinated, there were significantly fewer sick and dead children. In addition, the overall incidence of measles was also only a quarter of that in Leicester – 5.5 per 10,000 people.
However, although vaccination nearly eradicated smallpox in several European countries, it continued to ravage poorer countries and areas under colonial rule due to unequal access to vaccines.
The disease continued to kill more than two million people each year until the mid-20th century, and in 1959 began to take serious steps to eliminate the disease worldwide. By 1979, through consistent global y – gave new life to some posts that had first appeared 225 years earlier.
With the rise of social media in the early 2000s, this has only intensified. In 2018, nine out of ten adults in the UK thought vaccines were safe and effective. In 2023, only seven in ten will.
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At the same time, anti-vaccinators can influence even those who are unsure whether to believe false or misleading claims about vaccines. The very fact of exposure to anti-vaccination conspiracy theories is a strong predictor of whether parents vaccinate their children. In 2019, the WHO named vaccine hesitancy as one of the ten greatest public health threats in the world.
For example, measles is so contagious that each case leads to 12 to 18 new cases, requiring vaccination of more than 95% of the population to create o Vaccine proponents get money from the pharmaceutical industry, to the delusion that other public health improvements have made vaccines unnecessary.
The popularity of these narratives, Gorski says, is a reminder of the stubborn persistence of health misinformation. “The hesitancy and fear that leads to low vaccination rates is extremely persistent and driven by misinformation,” he says. If these ideas continue to spread, a measles epidemic in the U.S. could be just the beginning, he says.
David Robert Grimes is an associate professor of public health at Trinity College Dublin and author of Irrational Monkey: Why We Are Driven by Disinformation, Conspiracy Theories and Propaganda.