CULTS OF THE CULTURE WARS: “POLITICS AND THE CONSPIRACY OF VACCINES" (A.GLASS 2021)
*In light of the World Health Organization declaring the COVID-19 pandemic over, I present my article/s: "CULTS OF THE CULTURE WARS: POLITICS AND THE CONSPIRACY OF VACCINES". Written in 2021 at the height of the conspiracy theories, misinformation and politicization of vaccines. Which was reinforced manly by the extreme right wing via podcast echo chamber pundits and repetitive social media platforms.*
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
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.
Ref:
Alexander Milton Ross (1832-1897) antivaccine pamphlets
Lora Cornelia Little (1856-1931) “The Liberator”
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(A.Glass 2021)
New age alternatives to medical science and rightwing populism
When the Spanish Flu, which was brought into America shipping ports by returning services men from World War One, tore into American life. The already established fears of vaccinations and defiance against being vaccinated for Smallpox merged into elements of fringe health proponents, right wing conservatives under a conspiratorial libertarian banner to which they believe governments are trying to control and coherence the populous with so called experimental medical sciences. Despite the progress of reducing the scourge of smallpox with vaccinations, the science was still new and evolving with the discovery of new illnesses plaguing humanity, which were not seen as viruses until over a decade later in 1930’s under the new lore of Virology that recognized and began to study this micro entity which was indeed a culprit to the plethora of diseases affecting human beings, plants and animals. As the world, particularly America moved into what was deemed the Progressive Era of the 1920s and 30’s, technological advancement in medical sciences became more frequently embraced by the wider society, yet antivaccination movements remained and the more prominent and politically motived was the American Medical Liberty League to which, antivaccine advocate Lora Little was a part of. It was this very organized discord and widespread distribution of printed propaganda in the form of pamphlets which offered a greater coverage to the backlash against government sanction vaccination. However, alternative lifestyle choices, which was the first of new age philosophy and fitness which became a center point in the early 20th Century as an added direction to antivaccination movements in the form of entrepreneur and America’s first fitness guru Bernarr Macfadden.
Bernarr Macfadden was born in Mill Spring, Missouri in 1868, as a young child he had witnessed the ill health and death of his parents, particularly his mother who died form Tuberculosis, from an early age which from all accounts, through this childhood trauma, he began to look at alternative aspects of health, more so by pushing the ideas of exercise and diet as not only a personal perspective, but also as a societal importance. By 1899 after developing exercise equipment in England, he created the first fitness and muscle magazine called Physical Culture, despite his eccentric and at times bizarre behavior, Macfadden was highly influential for the time, representing fad diets through his publications, he also showed how mass media can create the groundwork for alternative medicines, diets and the early incarnations of New Age health movements. Macfadden was also a staunch antivaccinationist.
As the populism and right wing libertarian aspects gathered momentum into the 1920s, so did the backlash towards what the conservative mindset of American values feared, that government sanctioned socialism is threatening the constitution and the freedom of choice through vaccinations. As faddish diets were pushed and the beginning of the fitness industry developed, Macfadden showed, despite his eccentricity, a more authoritarian perspective to health and fitness, going as far as offering a decree “Weakness is a crime, don’t be a criminal!” Alluding to his believe that America has become saddled down with laziness, poor diets and an over reliance of the medical profession. With Fascism gaining traction in Italy, Macfadden’s might-is-right rhetoric and his confidence trickery was able to captivate not just the likes of celebrates at the time, but even the American President Theodore Roosevelt. Yet, it was in 1931 that the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini who showed a keen interest in Macfadden’s exercise regimes, conjoined with Mussolin in a vis versa appreciation of Fascist ideology to which Macfadden stated after meeting with the Italian dictator, “There are times when I believe that America needs a Mussolini, as never before.” Macfadden eccentricity to the alternative health practices stayed with him until the end of his life, seen in his later years as more of a clown like figure, his initial imprint on how to spread misinformation through mass media, which included the skepticism of medical sciences and New Age beliefs in faddish diets and exercise that will solve societies ills resonated well after he died in 1955, after refusing medical treatment for a digestive disorder.
However this flirtation with extreme ideology of the right wing, particularly from Macfadden’s cult like fixture as an alternative health advocate, never the less creating a foundation of quackery that was, by its foundation anti-science and beliefs in a conspiracy based platform. Took on a bizarre turn when the predecessor, pulp fiction writer to Macfadden’s magazine empire Edward Longstreet Bodin, became the President of Bernarr MacFadden foundation in the late 1950s, maintain the anti science aspects and faddish diets, yet Longstreet Bodin went further exasperating the right wing conspiracy theories under his tenure, from claims that death of Franklin Roosevelt, who was friends with Macfadden, was due to psychic intervention to prevent America’s government from being taken over by Communists. This oddity of conspiratorial and the mistrust with Government sanctioned medical sciences continued on throughout the 20th Century as it melded onto the more extreme of libertarian beliefs.
Ref:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bernarr-Macfadden
https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/1920s-american-medical-liberty-league-1920741074
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Longstreet_Bodin
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A.Glass 2021
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