Grifters, scoffers, and true believers: The family tree of vaccine opponents

Stanley Plotkin, 93, helped develop many vaccines during his career. He recently said that “he is beginning to regret that he lived so long—because we are going to land.” How did we get here?

Maybe we’ve been here all along. It turns out that the anti-vaccine controversy that’s been flooding the internet has been going on for as long as the anti-vaccine campaign. In his new book Pox on FoolsThomas Levenson divides them into three groups, as is clearly indicated in the book’s subtitle: “The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines.” The penalties that these people pay for vaccinations can easily be used to divide the conflict itself: it is wrong, it is bad, and it is intolerable.

Wrong

As Levenson points out, in the early 18th century, several forward-thinking Westerners learned about the smallpox vaccine from Ottoman women and African slaves. At that time, infectious disease was the leading cause of death, as it had been forever. In the 1800s, about 40 out of every 100 children died of infectious diseases before the age of 5.

(This is why the average life expectancy at that time was so low. It wasn’t that people didn’t live past their 30s; if they survived childhood, they mostly survived. However, many young children died because they were dragged 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. Inoculation involved removing the pus from the pouch of a person with a mild case of smallpox, making a cut on the hand of the person to be injected, and applying the pus to the cut.

There was a return soon. Others said it was morally wrong, interfering with what God had ordained for those who would get sick and die and those who would not. Only God had that power, and to deny it was to violate God’s will. It was rude and rude. Levenson emphasizes how the basic premise of this situation was that contracting a highly contagious disease was divine punishment for sin and that the only way to avoid disease was to live a healthy life.