Charles Williams, A monster being fed baskets of infants and excreting them with horns; symbolising vaccination and its effects. 1802. Wellcome Library, London.
Measles is making a comeback in the West, at a twenty-year high in the US. Despite being utterly discredited, the link between the measles vaccine and autism still haunts the middle-class mind. After years of progress, polio is on the rise again in Pakistan. Vaccinators have been cast by the Taliban as Western villains, coming to sterilise their children. In Kenya, where 550 babies died of tetanus in 2013, Catholic Bishops have warned that tetanus vaccines have been adulterated with birth control drugs. However it is spread, and for whatever reason, political or moral, the fear of vaccination results in sick children, or worse.
Fear of vaccination is as old as vaccination itself. The particular spectre of fear changes from time to time, but we are the inheritors of a discursive and emotional habit, of casting doubt on the motives and methods of immunology. It is easy to generate new fears about vaccination because we have so many ready-made arguments, tried and tested. The fear of vaccination falls into four categories: fear of God; fear of contamination; fear of immorality; fear of Government and its attendant institutions. The first vaccine, brought to the attention of the general public by Edward Jenner in 1798, was the progenitor of these categories of fear. The progress of medicine against smallpox was checked for well over a century. The human cost ran into the millions of deaths.
Jenner’s first alleged crime was against God. Smallpox was a disease sent by the Maker in His infinite wisdom. To ward against it was a form of blasphemy. The vaccine – after the Latin for cow, from which the prophylactic cowpox virus was taken – was beastly. Was it not a risk to the sanctity and essentialism of the human to taint the blood with brute matter? The contamination fears were comingled with further concerns about moral and sexual impropriety. To commune with the beast in this way smacked of bestiality. The modern Minotaur was envisaged as the chimerical result of reckless vaccination. Even worse, cowpox was thought by some to be Bovine syphilis. For the first century of vaccination, medical experts and the vulgar alike maintained the rumour that to vaccinate a child was to risk it with syphilis.
And then there is fear of government. The original drive to eliminate smallpox played a major part in the genesis of social medicine. Government interest and intervention in the health matters of private citizens and families rapidly increased in the name of smallpox prevention. Vaccination against smallpox was made compulsory in England in 1853, and severe penalties were introduced for parents who refused to comply, including large fines and prison sentences. Parental non-compliance was often based on one or more of the fears listed above, but a good many refused to submit their children on a principle of liberty and a misguided vigilance. What government had the right to command parents to infect their children? What was the vested interest of the State in the family? What information was being withheld? How could a government be trusted?
Such fears still sound a familiar note, even though we know a great deal more about how vaccination works than did our nineteenth-century forebears. Fear is easily driven by anecdote; the antidote to fear – knowledge – has proven much more difficult to spread. Fear is infectious. Fuelled by hearsay and social media, it goes viral. To assuage doubt takes time, repetition, money and commitment. Only by a concerted effort, to vaccinate and to educate, did the World Health Organization manage successfully to eliminate smallpox from the planet in 1979. With such a long history of ready-made, ready-to-go memes of the fear of vaccination, it will take an enormous effort of communication and coordination to wipe away fears of vaccination today. They remain the principal barrier to wiping away measles, polio, tetanus, and a host of other diseases that need no longer afflict us.
Rob Boddice is an historian of science, medicine and the emotions, based in Berlin and Montreal. Educated in York, he has published books on the history of human-animal relations, anthropocentrism, and pain. His book, Edward Jenner: pocket GIANT, will be published by The History Press next year.