22. An Unscrupulous Anti-Vaccination Campaign That Targeted the Poor and Poorly Educated
By the time smallpox arrived in Montreal in the spring of 1885, Edward Jenner’s vaccine was nearly a century old, and its effectiveness was well known. Nonetheless, Montreal suffered an epidemic that killed off 40% of those who came down with an easily preventable disease. The reason was a successful anti-vaccination campaign, that raised dumb objections to and stoked unfounded fears about the inoculation. The fear mongering was most effective in Montreal’s east side, inhabited mostly by poorer and less educated French Canadians.
Those unfortunates, misguided by unscrupulous and irrational anti-vaxxers, ended up making nine-tenths of those killed by the contagion. Vaccine opponents made it their mission to whip up worries about the smallpox vaccine. One of the more prominent of their numbers was a Dr. Alexander M. Ross, who edited a publication called The Anti-Vaccinator. He falsely claimed that “vaccination is useless and dangerous”, and that the vaccine was “a fearful engine of destruction and death to children”. His efforts eventually whipped up dumb riots against the smallpox vaccine.
