CULTS OF THE CULTURE WARS: “Politics and the Conspiracy of Vaccines" (A.Glass 2021)

Small Pox and the early Antivaccination movements. 

The Variola virus better known as Smallpox that had been plaguing humanity for centuries as a recorded pathogen since the 6th Century when Asian societies began trading with each other among seafaring routes. By the 18th Century, explorers and traders carried the virus, becoming a global health issue with no nation unscathed by its terrible effect on peoples around the world. In extreme cases bodies were covered with pustules, sores that became infected, to which the virus was easily spread from person to person. Yet, its effect on the human circulatory system, bone marrow and respiratory system lead to every three out of ten of infected people to die from the virus. It was the English physician Edward Jenner, who observed milkmaids, that had contracted Cowpox from Cow’s udders and seemly were not as affected by the Smallpox strain, so in 1796 as an instinctive experiment Jenner deliberately infected a farm boy with pus from a Milkmaid Cowpox hand pustules, in turn the young boy did not become ill or succumb to the extremity of Smallpox, hence was the first case of a person becoming immune via the first concept of inculcation through vaccination. Yet, it was not without controversy. 

Jenner performed a process before the discovery of key differences of viruses and bacterial over 100 years later in 1898 by Martinus Beijerinck a Dutch microbiologist; in the creating of antibodies within human cells to develop an immunity against a foreign entity such as a Virus. However despite the success of controlling Smallpox through immunization, it required participants to have inserted, biologically, a needle with a disease that effects cows, as mass immunization of Smallpox began in the early 1800s, it also started the early manifestation of what we now know are the anti vaccination movements of the 19th Century. With this new science, came superstition and fears that extended from religions grounds, political and civil liberty beliefs that their freedoms was being comprised by the Smallpox vaccination process. More striking fear that circulated was the Cow biology fused with human cells could alter our own DNA, this was seen in a satirical cartoon by James Gillray (1756-1815) a caricaturist, titled, “The Cow-Pock—or—the Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation!”, which showed a pompous looking Edward Jenner injecting a crowd of peasantry looking people with his vaccine, with some of the inculcated, in a caricature, yet graphic way, showing live Cow heads appearing from beneath parts of the skin and face. 

As mass vaccinations against Smallpox began all around England in the mid 1800s, so did the anti vaccination movements, more so after the Vaccination Act of 1853 was passed. It was the clause that all citizens were to be vaccinated from the ages of four and upward that galvanised a backlash against the government of the time, with the The Anti Vaccination League forming, incorporating religious, libertarian and skeptical perspectives against widespread vaccination for the Smallpox virus. Fears of science melding with nature, that vaccinations are against God, government control and even the thought that Smallpox came from the atmosphere. Familiar aspects of fear and paranoia of the unknown, in an inability to accept that a micro entity could infect and destroy a living organism, which has evolved and spread from nature to human beings. But in the era of science over myth the public relies heavily on the medical advice of the scientific medical community of the day to advise on the relevancy and safety of vaccines, it is when this cohesiveness from the scientific community itself goes awry that the antivaccine movements and more extreme elements of conspiracy theories take hold.  

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Ref:  

https://www.themorgan.org/blog/cow-pock-or-wonderful-effects-new-inoculation

https://ftp.historyofvaccines.org/multilanguage/content/articles/history-anti-vaccinationmovements

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_virology 

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A.Glass 2021