Wednesday, September 01, 2021

Nothing new about anti-vaccine hysteria


First in a two-part series

In an early episode of the TV doctor drama “House” (2004-2012), the title character, played by Hugh Laurie, is talking to a mother who won’t vaccinate her baby because she believes it’s all a big scam.

Dr. House holds up the baby’s toy frog and offers some observations on the business model of the company that made it.

“You know another really good business?” he says abruptly. “Teeny, tiny baby coffins. You can get them in frog green, fire engine red. Really.”

Of course, House was saying the quiet part out loud for effect. Few non-fictional doctors would be so blunt.

But vaccine skepticism has become a major problem in the modern world — though perhaps not as prominent in Newfoundland and Labrador as it is in some parts of Canada and south of the border.

“Thankfully, in this province, I haven’t run into too much hesitancy over my career, which is different from a lot of my colleagues in the country and in the world,” Dr. Natalie Bridger told The Telegram this week.

Bridger, Eastern Health’s clinical chief of infection prevention and control, said she finds the sea of misinformation spread on Facebook and other social media sites “soul-crushing.”

“Vaccines are probably one of the main reasons why life expectancy has gone up and infant mortality has gone down,” she said. “There have been many other discoveries in the medical world over the past 100 or so years, but I would say vaccines are up there as probably No. 1.”

As it turns out, misinformation about vaccines has a surprisingly long history.


Take the case of Dr. Alexander Ross.

Ross was a member of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba in 1885 when he circulated a pamphlet lashing out at a small pox vaccination campaign underway in Montreal.


“His pamphlet serves as a prime illustration of the strategies used by anti-vaccinationists — both then and now,” Paula Larsson, a doctoral student in the history of medicine at Oxford, wrote for theconservation.com last year. “These arguments are not new and have changed little over time. Learning to recognize their repackaging in modern form can help with effectively combating their power.”

What are those strategies?


First, downplay the seriousness of the disease.

“Despite mortality rates between 30 and 40 per cent, and the extreme contagiousness of the disease, it was common for anti-vaccinationists to claim that smallpox was only a minor threat to a population,” wrote Larsson.

Ross insisted authorities were panicking over a minor outbreak, and that the disease wasn’t serious. In fact, more than 3,000 people — two per cent of Montreal’s population — died in the epidemic despite best efforts to combat it.

Another tactic parallel to today’s “anti-vaxx” propaganda was to trot out a litany of things the vaccine may cause. In recent times, we had the autism scare of 1998, which has since been soundly debunked (more on that in Part 2), but the alarmism was no different 100 years earlier.

“The anti-vaccinationists of the past claimed that vaccination caused a full spectrum of diseases, from smallpox itself to syphilis, typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera and ‘blood-poisoning,’” wrote Larsson.

The difference in the 19th century is that unsterile practices did occasionally cause secondary transmission of infections, something unlikely to occur today.

Larsson also highlights the tendency — then as now — to see media, experts and drug makers as part of a giant, money-making cabal, colluding to pull the wool over people’s eyes in order to capitalize on public fear.

And perhaps most surprisingly, the notion of personal freedom was as prominent a cudgel against vaccines in 1885 as it is in 2021.

“Tyranny detestable in any shape, but in none so formidable as when it is assumed and exercised by a number of petty tyrants,” Ross wrote in his pamphlet. “It is in vain for working men and women to plead that they do not believe in the efficacy of vaccination. They are told that they may believe what they like, but that vaccinated THEY MUST BE, or leave their employment, which to many of them means STARVATION!!”

Today’s social media warriors have nothing on the hyperbole of 1885.

“There have always been individuals who capitalize on medical crises to push their own agenda, and in the modern age of digital media, strategies of misinformation have evolved and expanded,” Larsson concludes. “Much like Ross, the leaders of these movements gain social power by painting themselves as lone crusaders.”

Peter Jackson, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Telegram

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