Two hundred years of anti-vaxxers, from 'cowpox face' to autism claims

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The anti-vaxxer movement is nothing new—in fact, it’s as old as vaccines themselves.

Anti-vaxxers are in the news regularly—the World Health Organization even named vaccine hesitancy one of the ten biggest threats to global health in 2019.1796: The smallpox vaccine is introducedIn the late 1790s, smallpox outbreaks devastated Europe, killing approximately 400,000 people a year and leaving many more blind or disfigured.

Thus the modern-day vaccination was born—and so, too, was the anti-vax movement: One of the earliest bits of anti-vaxxer propaganda also appeared around 1800—a French cartoon of two men weilding a giant syringe and pulling a monster behind them, as a group of children run in terror.

1853: The smallpox vaccine becomes compulsory in EnglandThe Vaccination Act of 1853 made smallpox vaccinations mandatory for all infants under three months, levying fines and prison terms against parents who refused. It spurred anti-vax sentiment throughout the country: Violent riots broke out in Ipswich, Henley and Mitford. In London, the Anti-Vaccination League was formed.

1870s: The American anti-vax movement gains momentumBritish reformer William Tebb began spreading anti-vax propaganda to Americans in the 1870s, including the statistics that 25,000 British children were “slaughtered” each year because of vaccines and that 80 percent of smallpox deaths were among people who had been vaccinated. Tebb’s arguments encouraged anti-vaxxers in the U.S.: The Anti-Vaccination League of America held its first meeting in New York in 1882.

Anti-vax books and journals advised parents on how to get around compulsory vaccinations. In 1885, nearly 100,000 demonstrators flooded Leicester to protest compulsory vaccination laws. They carried children’s coffins and beheaded an effigy of Edward Jenner. After Swedish immigrant Henning Jacobson was arrested for defying Massachusetts’ mandatory vaccination laws, his case went before the Supreme Court. In a landmark 1905 ruling, the justices ruled against Jacobson—a Lutheran pastor—by holding up proof that vaccinations provided herd immunization and that states had the right to impose mandatory vaccinations for the greater good of the community.

 

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Reading this article makes me think vaccines are not safe. The autism thing does look like a cover up. We can prove that our FDA approves things that can kill us and hurt us while refusing to let us even do official research on cannabis. How can we trust anything from the FDA?

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