Stanley Plotkin, 93, played an important role in the development of several vaccines during his career. He said recently that he is “beginning to regret living so long – for we are going downhill”. How could we get here?
Maybe we’ve always been here. It turns out that the anti-vaccine arguments currently flooding the internet have been around for as long as there have been vaccines. In his new book Pox on foolsAs Thomas Levenson makes clear in the book’s subtitle, he divides them into three categories: “True believers, grumps, and cynics who persuade us to reject vaccines.” The charges these people make against vaccines can easily be used to categorize the arguments themselves: They are wrong, they are bad, and they are intolerable.
Wrong
According to Levenson, in the early 18th century, several early Westerners learned about smallpox vaccines from Ottoman women and an enslaved African. At that time, infectious disease was, as always, the main cause of death. In the 19th century, about 40 percent of infants died of infection before age 5.
(That’s why the average life expectancy back then was so low. It wasn’t that people didn’t live past 30; if they survived childhood, they lived to a great extent. It’s just that so many young children died that they dragged the median down.)
When smallpox epidemics broke out in London and Boston in 1721, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Cotton Mather started vaccination campaigns in their cities. The inoculation consisted of taking pus from the pocket of a person with mild smallpox, cutting the arm of the person to be vaccinated, and applying the pus to the incision.
There was an immediate backlash. Some argued that it was morally wrong to interfere with the divine appointment of who would get sick and die and who would not. Only God had this ability, and to prevent it was to oppose God’s will. It was blasphemy and blasphemy. Levenson points out that the subtext of this attitude is that contracting a highly contagious disease is divine punishment for sin, and that the only way to avoid the disease is to live a virtuous life.
