Stanley Plotkin, 93, played a key role in developing several vaccines during his career. He recently said that he was “beginning to regret surviving so long – because we are going into decline.” How could we possibly get here?
Maybe we’ve always been here. It turns out that the anti-vaccine arguments currently on the Internet have been around for as long as there have been vaccines. in his new book a pox on foolsThomas Levenson divides them into three categories, as made clear in the book’s subtitle: “The true believers, the grifters, and the cynics who convinced us to reject vaccines.” The charges these people make against vaccines can easily be used to categorize the arguments they make: They’re wrong, they’re bad, and they’re intolerable.
Wrong
As Levenson explains, in the early 18th century, some far-sighted Westerners learned about vaccination against smallpox from Ottoman women and an enslaved African. At that time, infectious disease was the leading cause of death, as it always has been. In the 19th century, about 40 percent of children died from infections before the age of 5.
(This is why the average life span was so short at the time. It wasn’t that people didn’t live past 30; if they survived childhood, they lived extensively. It’s just that so many young children died that they dropped below average.)
When smallpox epidemics broke out in London and Boston in 1721, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Cotton Mather initiated vaccination campaigns in their respective cities. Vaccination involved removing pus from the pocket of someone with a less severe case of smallpox, making an incision in the arm of the person being vaccinated, and rubbing the pus into the wound.
There was an immediate reaction. Some claimed that it was morally wrong to interfere with the divine providence of who would get sick and who would die and who would not. Only God had that ability, and to fail it was to disobey God’s will. This was arrogance and blasphemy. Levenson highlights that the subtext of this view was that contracting a highly contagious disease was divine punishment for sin and the only way to avoid the disease was to live a virtuous life.
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