CULTS OF THE CULTURE WARS: “Politics and the Conspiracy of Vaccines (part 1)” August 16, 2021 (A.Glass)
The rise of Misinformation and Antiscience
Although there were numerous anti-vaccination movements and individuals that rallied against widespread Smallpox inoculations which were occurring throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s. One of the more prominent of the era was Canadian scientist and a renown abolitionist Dr. Alexander Milton Ross (1832-1897) who campaigned throughout Canada as an ardent anti-vaccine activist against Smallpox inoculations, widely circulating his pamphlets in Montreal during 1885 vaccination blitz against Smallpox of the same year. He targeted the fears, with his pamphlets, of young children been forcefully inoculated with a vaccination that he claimed was “Poisonous”. Ross would have been considered a left leaning libertarian, yet his distrust of Government endorsed vaccinations programs echoes a similarity in its discord that decades later the more right wing and conspiracy orientated libertarian beliefs would embrace. More alarming was his efforts to downplay the Smallpox epidemic in Montreal at that time, as proof that government are taking away peoples freedoms, utilizing the word “Tyranny” with an emphasis perpetuated through Ross’s pamphlet writings, that if one does not get vaccinated you will be told to “leave their employment,”. It was later discovered that a lot of Ross’s motivations as an anti-vaccination advocate was motived by his libertarian ideology, as it was revealed, although denied by himself at the time, that he and his family were actually inoculated via the immunization process of vaccination. But the dissenting echo of medical scientists that suggest through papers and their own, if even it is seen as pseudo science or incomplete and not peer reviewed research, that vaccination is dangerous has risen steadily throughout the 20th Century.
If the bases to most anti vaccination movements is of the argument that personal liberty and individualist freedom will be impeded by government, it is these so called bastions of freedom, who rail against vaccinations that have imprinted a political sound board as the main vocal point. Which in turn have created a plethora of anti-scientific elements more specifically, apart from, as discussed, it being infused with pseudoscientific findings and dietary remedies, to which proponents against mass vaccinations have cherry picked findings to suit their anti-vaccinationist stance. But it is this core aspects of the political backlash, that gravitates towards the conspiratorial which has, throughout history, laid the ground work, although not intentionally, for the more extreme political ideologies.
The Smallpox vaccination backlash was further dramatized into a more peremptory setting when Lora Cornelia Little, a mother, who lost her only child in April 1896, to which she blamed the Small Pox vaccination when her son, when it was in fact diphtheria that killed him. Became transfixed that the smallpox vaccination was responsible for his death and in 1898 she founded her monthly magazine “The Liberator”, which was Little’s vocal point against the science of vaccinations, promoting healthy lifestyle, diet and homeopathic remedies to contagious diseases which also included cancer. However, Little’s political inclinations, although they would be considered left of a libertarian viewpoint and her anti scientific viewpoints very pronounced through the publication the Liberator. It was in 1916, that Little showed a more extremist perspective on vaccinations, to which she was charged with mutiny and imprisoned in the State of Dakota, when she advised to a crowd of American soldiers in one of her tours that they should not be vaccinated. After the conviction and short jail term for what was considered as Anti-American propaganda, Little retired from the public life, refraining from giving talks and speeches, yet she maintained her stance against vaccines on as contributor to the newly formed American Medical Liberty League.
Although Little was more, of what could be considered, new-age in her antivaccination beliefs, it was at the tail end of her life did she offer a more vehement stance against medical sciences. Which could be argued began to formulate around not only the conspiratorial aspects of her beliefs but also a right wing anti-science platform, that had started to gain traction throughout the early 20th Century.
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