The Poor and Poorly Informed Paid a Terrible Price for Believing Anti-Vaccine Activists
By the time smallpox struck Montreal in 1885, nearly a century had passed since Edward Jenner had developed a vaccine, and its effectiveness had been amply proven. 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 an unfounded panic about the inoculation. The fear tactics were most effective in Montreal’s east side, inhabited mostly by poorer and less educated French Canadians.
Misguided by unscrupulous and irrational anti-vaccine activists, those unfortunates made up nine tenths of those killed by the contagion. Vaccine opponents made it their mission to whip up worries and a moral panic about the smallpox inoculation. 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 a panic against the smallpox vaccine.
