Stanley Plotkin, 93, was instrumental in the development of several vaccines throughout his career. He recently said that “he is beginning to regret having lived so long, because we are going downhill.” How could we have gotten here?
Maybe we’ve always been here. It turns out that the anti-vaccine arguments currently flooding the Internet have been around as long as vaccines have. In his new book A smallpox against foolsThomas Levenson divides them into three categories, as is clear from the book’s subtitle: “The true believers, con artists and cynics who convinced us to refuse vaccines.” The accusations these people level against vaccines can just as easily be used to categorize the arguments themselves: they are wrong, they are bad, and they are intolerable.
Mistaken
As Levenson tells it, in the early 18th century, a pair of forward-thinking Westerners learned about smallpox vaccinations from Ottoman women and an enslaved African. At that time, infectious diseases were by far the leading cause of death, as they had always been. In the 19th century, about 40 percent of babies died from infection before their fifth birthday.
(This is why the average life expectancy back then was so low. It’s not that people didn’t live past 30; if they survived childhood, they largely did. It’s just that so many young children died that they dragged the average down.)
When smallpox epidemics broke out in London and Boston in 1721, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Cotton Mather began inoculation campaigns in their respective cities. Inoculation involved taking smallpox pus from someone with a not very serious case of smallpox, making a cut in the arm of the person to be inoculated, and rubbing the pus into the cut.
There was an immediate reaction. Some claimed that it was morally wrong to interfere with God’s ordering of who would become ill and die and who would not. Only God had that ability, and to thwart it was to defy God’s will. It was arrogance and blasphemy. Levenson highlights how the subtext of this attitude was that contracting a highly infectious disease was divine punishment for sin and that the only way to avoid the disease was to live a virtuous life.
