Thanks to all the shots in the arm, in 2000, measles in the United States was announced. But now, it’s making a comeback, with measles cases being reported from California to Vermont.
CBS News
One big reason: across the country in 2023, more families will exempt their children from routine immunizations than ever before.
“There has never been a better time in human history to deal with infectious diseases than now,” said Dr. Howard Markel, a medical historian, retired from the University of Michigan. “There are many things that can be done, from vaccines to antivirals to antibiotics. However, I am surprised by the volume of anti-vax voices.”
History of vaccine hesitancy
Markel said vaccine skepticism is as old as the United States. In the 1700s, when smallpox ravaged the colony, some people were given an early immunization called variolation. “You go to a doctor who has this infectious material — dried pus and smallpox scar detritus and stuff like that,” Markel said. “They’ll cut you open, make a slit in your arm, and inoculate – ‘insert’ – your arm. And half of the people get very sick, and some die. So, it’s very expensive and dangerous.”
But the sane are immune.
Benjamin Franklin decided it was too dangerous for his sick four-year-old son, Franky. “One of Franklin’s great regrets is that he did not inoculate his son, injecting him with the smallpox virus, to prevent what ultimately killed him,” Markel said.
In the 1800s, as a safer smallpox vaccine was developed, many cities and states required smallpox vaccinations. At the University of California at Berkeley in 1902, it was compulsory.
The students were horrified, said professor Elena Conis, a medical historian at Berkeley. “And the people of the city rejoiced.
In 1905, the Supreme Court ruled that the government had the authority to require vaccinations. “This, importantly, has had the effect of empowering many anti-vaccine groups,” Conis said. “And anti-vaccine groups at the time believed they were defenders of individual freedom.”
Victory over polio
But in the 1950s, there was one thing that gripped the United States: the fear of polio. Markel said, “The idea that your child will be paralyzed or, worse, condemned to an iron lung, this giant tank that your head comes out of and that’s how you breathe forever, people are very scared.”
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When Dr. Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine, he was considered a hero. “The greatest faith that the American medical industrial complex probably had was around the 1950s,” Markel said. “And here you have a photogenic Jonas Salk with his wife and kids, and he’s saving the world.”
The 1950s may be considered the high water mark for vaccine acceptance. Vaccines were later developed for diseases such as measles, mumps, and rubella. As Americans, especially children, get shots, rates for the disease drop.
But it all goes directly to the counterculture decade of the 1960s. Conis said, “As more doctors and public health officials encourage people to get vaccinated, or encourage their children to get vaccinated, people say, ‘But then: I have to ask. What are these vaccines for? What is there? in them?
The overwhelming medical consensus is that the benefits of vaccines outweigh the risks. But the rise of the anti-vaccine movement was fueled by a 1998 study in the prestigious British journal The Lancet that linked the measles vaccine to autism.
It took 12 years for the journal retracted the study after concluding the study was fraudulent.
Vaccine advocacy, and dissenting voices
Dr. Peter Hotez has spent decades working to develop vaccines at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital. “If you had asked me 40 years ago whether I should be defending vaccines as much as I do today, I would have said you are crazy,” he said. “Everyone knows the life-saving impact of vaccination.”
One study estimates that by the end of 2022, the COVID vaccine will have saved more than three million American lives. And according to Hotez, “We’re reaching the level of 200,000 Americans who will needlessly die from refusing the COVID vaccine.”
Hotez entered the public debate as a passionate advocate for vaccines, and became a bit of a lightning rod, telling an audience at Northwestern University in Chicago, “I’m worried about a full-frontal attack on biomedical science. … talk about the anti-vaccine, anti-science movement.” , we call it misinformation or info-demic, as though it’s just some random garbage out there on the internet. And I don’t want to convince you today it’s organized. It’s politically motivated, and it has a harmful effect.”
With public figures like former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. voicing vaccine skepticism, Hotez believes that politics has changed the historical rationale for vaccine resistance.
Asked why anyone would want others not to be vaccinated, Hotez replied, “It’s a form of political control.
Conis was asked if he was concerned about where vaccines are now in general: “What I will say is that I am not surprised. We have been here, in some aspects, before. The vaccination resistance bubble rises when we use more vaccines, and when we use more many legal powers to encourage or require vaccination When I hear arguments, and when I hear frustration that people are not vaccinated. why don’t they know? – I replied, ‘Let’s understand their disbelief, let’s understand their concerns, and let’s take them seriously.’
But when we try to benefit from the lessons of history, Hotez reminds us that the clock is ticking: “What we are talking about now, such as COVID-19, H5N1, is the act of warming. You know, Mother Nature is not so coy with us, right? She told us , ‘I will throw a pandemic at you every few years, and the more prepared you are, the more you can convince your population to accept the vaccine, the damage will not be there before.'”
For more information:
- Medical historian and pediatrician Dr. Howard Markel
- “Origin Story: The Trials of Charles Darwin” by Howard Markel (WW Norton & Co.), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org
- Elena Conis, historian of medicine, public health, and the environment, University of California, Berkeley
- “Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization” by Elena Conis (University of Chicago Press), in Hardcover, Trade Paperback, eBook and Audio formats, available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org
- Dr. Peter Jay Hotez, Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital
- “The Deadly Rise of Anti-science: A Scientist’s Warning” by Peter J. Hotez (Johns Hopkins University Press), in Hardcover, Trade Paperback and eBook formats, available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org
Story produced by Alan Golds and Amiel Weisfogel. Editor: Remington Corp.
See also:
Jon Lapook
