25. Dumb Anti-Vaxxer Takes From the 1800s
Opposition to Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine was fierce from some segments of the public. Their rationales varied and included religious, sanitary, political, and science-y sounding gibberish objections. Some, including many of the clergy, though that vaccination with the cowpox was “unchristian” because it came from an animal. Some had a general distrust of medicine and rejected Jenner’s ideas about how the disease spread. Rather than infection from person to person, they thought that smallpox was caused by decayed matter in the atmosphere.
Some parents were afraid of the process of vaccination in of itself. Syringes with needles had not been invented yet, and inoculation was performed via a cut in a child’s arm, into which lymph from a person who had been vaccinated about a week earlier was inserted. Others objected to vaccination on grounds that violated their personal liberty. The latter objections grew in vehemence when governments tired of explaining the public benefit of mass vaccination to those too dumb to – or too determined not to – get it, and developed mandatory vaccine policies.
