Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Birth of the Anti-Vaccine Movement

Episode Date: February 19, 2019

In episode 48, Robert is joined by Anna Salinas to discuss the origins of the anti-vaccine movement.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. How are you feeling today? Well, you know, I'm excited to learn about today's topic. I am a little nervous because there are certain vaccines that I haven't gotten. I guess I'm tipping the hand a little bit.

Why haven't you gotten them? Just because I don't get flu shots usually just because of laziness. Not ideological. It's a fine to endanger people at a laziness. I'm just about to hear the magnitude by which I have endangered people. Well, you're a fan of vaccines. Yeah, I'm a general fan of vaccines. As someone who has never gotten polio as a mod, I'm a big ups on that stuff. Today we're going to be talking in detail about the anti-vaccine movement.

When I first started, this was all going to be about the modern anti-vax movement. We were going to talk about everything from Andrew Wakefield on. As I started researching, I realized that it actually goes back a lot further than that. This is going to be kind of a deep dive. I'm excited. Right now, as you and I talk, the Pacific Northwest is dealing with a measles outbreak. Many cases have been confirmed in an area around the city of Portland, Oregon, both in Oregon and Washington. Some of the suburbs of Portland, Oregon are actually parts of Washington, like Clark County.

That number kept creeping up as I was writing this. It was like 35 when I started on the episode and it's 50 now. It'll probably be 70 to 100 by the time the people listening to this right now in the future listen to it. Portland, Oregon is a really good city to have an outbreak of a preventable disease like measles because 8% of the children in that city are unvaccinated, meaning the pool of infectable individuals is pretty high. Alongside New York and certain affluent parts of California, the city of Portland is a current stronghold of the anti-vaccine movement. It's like if you swing hipster enough, you end up anti-vax. It's true for the far left and the far right.

This is one thing where if you're like a fucking far left loony or you're like a fascist, both of those groups have sizable people who are like, vaccines are a lie. You can get Alex Jones and fucking, what's his name? Ace Ventura? Jim Carrey on the same side of the vaccine trade. Is Jim Carrey also? He was kind of for a while because he was dead in Jenny McCarthy. I'm actually not going to hit on her much in this episode just because I taught special ed for a while and I feel for a parent who's trying to grapple with something like that happening. I just don't want to like...

That's fair. She's definitely done a lot of damage, but she's not the start of it. There's bigger fish. There's bigger fish to fry, so let's get that pan out, let's heat up some oil. I just made tilapia last night. Oh man, bread it with like panko. Do you bread it or are you just frying it? I thought I was breading it with parmesan to make it protein heavy and it didn't work.

Oh man, you know what I found that's really good is there's this kind of low carb flour called carb quick that has a shitload of protein in it and you mix a bunch of shredded up cheese in that and then you like crack an egg in that. And you still do that whole thing. Yeah, it's so good. That's what I'm doing next time. This is a podcast where we talk about various recipes for frying fish in order to maximize the protein. It will relate back to anti-vaxxers.

It does. It does. Tilapia specifically. Specifically. Of the fish, they are the ones that resist vaccination the most. They do. They do. And it's because they're very left wing, not right wing.

Well fin. A fin is a wing. Yeah. For the water. Anyway, let's move into here. So it would be hard to consume media in the 21st century and not run into stories about the anti-vax movement and how it's been spurred on by the endorsement of celebrities. The anti-vax movement seems like a new problem, something that could only be spread via the internet's incredible ability to make lies go viral.

But the sad, weird reality is that none of this is true. The anti-vax movement does not have its origins in the 21st century or the 20th century. This shit has been going on for more than 200 years. It's almost as old as the United States. So as long as there have been vaccines, there have been people being like, yeah, I don't believe it. Yeah. And in the case of the United States, slightly longer. What?

How? That's what we're about to get into. It's wild. So the story of vaccines, and thus the story of the anti-vax movement, starts with smallpox. Smallpox is one of those diseases that's so bad we almost can't really comprehend it. A bolus scares people, but it's kind of hard to spread Ebola once you know what it is. Smallpox is super easy to spread from direct transmission to transmission. And it's incredibly deadly.

Something like a third of people who get it die. Or at least back in the day, people who got it died. And the disease starts with a fever and then ends with this full body eruption of scabs. You're covered in scabs that leave behind crater your face and body in permanent scars for the rest of your lives. Oh my God. So if you survive a full smallpox outbreak, it looks like someone blasted off a bunch of birdshot into your face. You look like you've been hunting with Dick Cheney after getting this disease. It's just terrible.

And this isn't like in warfare, people would throw the smallpox blankets as a weapon? I mean, I don't think they would throw the blankets. There's certainly been some use of smallpox and other illnesses in warfare. Like the Mongols would catapult like dead animals over the walls and stuff with the plague. You know, I don't know enough about, I know that there's some controversy over whether or not smallpox blankets were like intentionally spread. But the mortality rate among Native Americans to smallpox was something like 80%. So the majority, it's very likely that most of the deaths that occurred of the 100 million or so people who died when Europeans started coming to North and South America, most of that was smallpox.

It just spread like wildfire. Oh God. Because smallpox is a disease that comes from the fact that we live around animals. It's like related to cowpox, which is a thing that cows have that people can get. That's the big reason why, I'm sure a lot of people know this, but that's a big reason why Native Americans got so fucked over by European diseases. They hadn't been living next to pigs and cows to the same extent that Europeans have. Livestock, sure.

So we were just like, Europeans are filthy. Oh my God, that's why I hate shows where people go back in time to like the middle ages and everything's fine. It's like, no, you would die of the diseases and everything would stink so hard. It would smell so bad. I'm sorry, Outlander, I don't believe your premise. No, and in fact the only people that you could hang out around in that time period who wouldn't stink would have been the Native Americans, because they were actually like pretty clean people and lived pretty clean lives

and weren't surrounded by poop all the time. Yeah, that's European cities in the middle ages and beyond. It's just a pile of poop and corpses. We're getting a little off topic here. So smallpox is terrible and it lasts a long time. Imagine the worst flu you ever had. It's like two weeks of flu followed by like three weeks of scab eruptions. It's like a month of being sick.

And then you die probably. A lot of times you die. By the end of the 18th century an estimated 400,000 Europeans were dying every year from smallpox. So that's a lot of people. It killed like, yeah, three in ten, but for children in the elderly the death rate was much higher. In London, most children would catch smallpox before their seventh birthday. If there was an outbreak in town, it was not uncommon for parents to avoid naming their babies. Just because like, let's see if he lives through this smallpox thing.

Because nine out of ten fatal smallpox cases involve children under the age of five. There's a real baby killer here. Like, yeah, it wipes out some babies. Now, the good news is that smallpox was only spread by direct contact with a sufferer. At the time, smallpox scabs were believed to be a main vector for the disease. And it's possible for you to get smallpox from smallpox scabs. But modern science has revealed that the scabs are only really infectious when ground up. So it was really just direct contact that was spreading most of the time.

So the good thing about smallpox is that surviving it conferred a lifelong immunity to the disease. So you get it once, you never get that shit again. It's like the chicken pox. Like all the poxes, really. That's how poxes work. That's how poxes work. There you go. Starting in the 10th century, Chinese doctors would grind up smallpox scabs and have people snort them.

This gave the patient a milder form of the disease that conferred a short. Boy, I love motorcycles. But it almost was like tone music for what was happening. So snorting a bunch of smallpox scabs gives you a short term immunity. But still like three to five and a hundred would die from this treatment. So it was better than if there's a smallpox. It would die from the treatment itself. So if there's smallpox spreading in your city, it's best to snort some scabs.

Because you get a better chance of surviving that. And you won't get as many scars and stuff. But it's still really risky. Now, in the 20th century alone, smallpox killed an estimated 300 million human beings, more than all of the centuries wars put together. So in the 1900s, this was deadlier than World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Korea, all of those fucking wars thrown into a bucket, smallpox killed more people. That's after we had a vaccine.

After. Yeah, the disease was, I think the last case was in the 70s in Somalia. So it has been effectively eradicated in the wild. That's incredible. Yeah, it took, you know, a while to get that shit done. So the road to eradicating smallpox started in 1796 when Edward Jenner, a genius, gave a presentation to the Royal Society of London. Jenner told them he'd injected 13 people with live infectious material from the scabs of people with cowpox,

a disease related to smallpox. The cowpox gave its victims an immunity to smallpox. And so when exposed to smallpox later, these 13 patients were unharmed. Jenner named his new invention, the vaccine, because vaca means cow in Latin. Whoa. Yeah, it's cool. The only reason he knew this is because as a young man, he was friends with some milkmaids. And they would have scabs on their hands and be like, yeah, you get that from cows,

but I can't get smallpox. And he was like, what do you mean you can't get smallpox? And he was like, oh yeah, you get this weird cowpox thing and you're fine. So he was like, oh shit. Wow, bring women into the process sooner. Was he friends with them or? I don't know. Friends with some milkmaids.

I mean, just fucking a lot of milkmaids. Sounds like it. Smallpox himself and is like, I don't know what's going on. Wait, that he didn't either? No, no, no, no. I'm just making that part up. That was just a lie. Jenner was the first person to formally describe and develop a vaccine.

His work sparked a massive medical renaissance and is in many ways the birth of modern Western medicine. It wouldn't be until the 1950s when heat stable versions of the smallpox vaccine would finally be figured out, thus eliminating most of the negative side effects of the inoculation. Jenner's work was a huge step forward, but vaccination was still a very unpleasant process. Here's a quote from the book, Pox and American History, which I really recommend. With a willing patient, the vaccine operation, as doctors called it, lasted just a minute or two. The doctor took hold of the patient's arm, scoring the skin with a needle or lancet. He then dabbed on the vaccine, either by taking a few droplets of liquid lymph from a glass tube

or using a small ivory point coated with dry vaccine. Either way, the vaccine contained live cowpox or vaccinia virus that not long before had oozed from a sore on the underside of an infected calf in a health department stable. In the coming days, the virus would produce a blister-like vesicle on the vaccination site. In due course, the lesion would heal, leaving a permanent scar, a distinctive vaccination cicatrix. If all went well, the patient would then enjoy immunity from smallpox for five to seven years, sometimes longer. So, when you're immune, you can't pass on the disease, you can't get it, you get a scar on your arm, and you get sick. Like, some people are sick for a week or two, like, get a really bad flu.

Like, it can take you out of commission for a couple of weeks. So, it's way better than getting smallpox, but it still really sucks, and that's important for what comes next. So, because the societal cost of smallpox epidemics was so high, governments around the world were quick to embrace the new treatment. Many of the people in those countries, however, were less than enthused about the idea of having pieces of an infected calf sore pushed under their arm, like, it's gross. Yeah. Yeah, somebody's taking, like, a scab from a cow's tit. Right, and up until this point, I feel like medicine has been pretty wonky.

Like, with letting blood and... Yeah, drinking mercury. ...humors, so it's like, I can see how that distrust continues. Yeah, it's not like today where doctors make miracles happen every day. It was like, well, this guy also told my uncle to drink all that mercury, and then my uncle died from drinking all that mercury, so I don't want to trust him. Exactly. Not that Edward Jenner was a big mercury fan.

Like, doctors in general, like... Right, the change, I think, and I'm really basing this off of the show Outlander, but the change between people's understanding of science and medicine seemed to be pretty abrupt. This is when it was just starting. Yeah. And so doctors are still, like, it's not exactly a highly thought-of profession by many people. Right. Because so much of medicine was bullshit at this point.

Exactly. So that's important, too. The anti-vaccine movement actually reached American shores before vaccination did. In 1798, two years before a Harvard doctor performed the first U.S. vaccinations, a group of doctors and priests in Boston created the first anti-vaccination society. They stated that vaccination was, quote, defiance to heaven itself, even to the will of God. Oh, God. Yeah, it's fun stuff.

So two years before there's even vaccinations, there's people being like, this is the devil. Yeah. Yeah. It's simply because you are putting the disease into you and they're like, there's no way. I think for those people, because it was like a religious thing, they were like, well, God wants you to get sick or not. Right. And if you're, this is trying to like thwart the will of the Lord.

And I wonder too if it has to do with power, like the people going out and saying, I can protect you, like the people with the church or older doctors saying, this is how you're protected if someone else comes with an answer. Yeah, because at that point, a lot of priests would have been like, the only way to protect yourself is to like get right with God. Yeah. And then some doctors like, well, no, we've got this thing and you're like, ooh, we don't want that going on here.

Yeah. Yeah. It's 1998, motherfucker. It still doesn't feel that late. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's really not. Thomas Jefferson was the U.S.'s first major vaccine advocate.

Like he was the, like during his presence, he was like, we gotta get on this shit. Yeah. This is really working over in England. In 1809, smallpox vaccination was made mandatory in Massachusetts. West Virginia followed soon after. In 1840, the British Parliament passed the Vaccination Act, which made it illegal and punishable by fines for a parent to fail to vaccinate their child. As vaccines spread through the West, doctors started noticing something interesting.

The smallpox virus appeared to be dying out. They discovered something called herd immunity. When a virus has nowhere to go because so many people are immune, it eventually goes extinct, first in areas and then perhaps worldwide. But the path to eradicating smallpox would not be so simple. In cities like Stockholm and London, concerned parents began spreading rumors of the harms of vaccines and complaining about the fines levied on them if they failed to vaccinate their kids.

Discover Magazine had a great write-up on this, and they described these early anti-vaxxers as mostly, quote, middle-class citizens who didn't trust government, science, or medicine. Oh, no. Too close to home. Yeah, nothing ever changes. I mean, that's like the- Jesus. Ugh. And Stockholm.

What are you doing? Well, yeah. It's those tricky Swedes. Ugh. You know, every time I want to root for them, they turn around and do this. Because I love their sandwiches. I love just a pile of bread with, like, white sauce and just a pile of tiny shrimp on it. Oh, the best.

Oh, man. Best sandwiches. That's what it is. I can't even pronounce that shit. Yeah. Look, I'll follow Sweden's Twitter account until I die, because it's just the most delightful. But goddamn it, Stockholm. I've had one breakfast in Stockholm.

Oh. One breakfast in Stockholm. And it was- it had, like, an actual restaurant. Like, told to me is like a traditional Swedish, like, breakfast buffet. Uh-huh. And it had all the beer I could drink at eight in the morning. So I'm- I love this- I love Stockholm. Yeah.

But they were wrong about this. That hearty Viking stock. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So, for a while, the anti-vaccine stuff was just talk, but the rapid expansion of the global post in the late 1800s and the increased affordability of printing pamphlets and magazines at the same time led to an explosion of anti-vaccine literature. I'm going to quote now from the British Medical Journal.

This is about, like, the anti-vaccine journals. Quote, the journals included the anti-vaccinator founded 1869, the national anti-compulsory vaccination reporter, 1874, and the vaccination inquirer, 1879. Similar movements flourished elsewhere in Europe. In Stockholm, the majority of the population began to refuse vaccinations, so that by 1872, vaccination rates in Stockholm had fallen to just over 40%, whereas they approached 90% in the rest of Sweden. Fearing a serious epidemic, the chief city physician demanded stricter measures.

A major epidemic in 1874 shocked the city and led to widespread vaccination and an end to further epidemics. So, the Swedes did get the picture after, like, two epidemics, like, maybe anti-vaccination's bullshit. Yeah. When everyone around you starts dying. All this makes me think of is my great-grandma in Sweden who was so religious, just so freakin' religious, pro-church.

I'm like, okay, I get it. Swedes have their bad side, too. They do? Yeah. They do? Now, Great Britain did not get the message in such a timely manner. The city of Leichester, for some reason, became the nexus of anti-vaccine resistance. Groups of furious parents would gather and march and show off signs.

In 1885, 100,000 anti-vaccine advocates marched in Leichester. To hang Dr. Edward Jenner in effigy for the crime of venting the smallpox vaccine, this prompted the government to create a royal commission to investigate the claims of the anti-vaccine advocates and read evidence on vaccines and their possible downsides. It released its report in 1896 and concluded that vaccines worked and were good. That said, it also advocated ending government penalties for people who refused vaccination. A new conscience clause in the Vaccine Act of 1898 allowed parents to receive a certificate of exemption.

This is actually the first time the phrase conscientious objector was entered into English law. That's wild. That's where it comes from. That it's, first of all, so parallel to the penalties if you didn't have health care with Obamacare. Yeah. Which is like, oh, just suck it up.

Or just give people free health care like most of the rest of the rest of the Western world. That's where conscientious observer comes from. Objector. Yeah. Objector. Yeah. So within a decade, conscientious objectors accounted for one quarter of all births in

England. So it immediately gets out of hand. Spurred on by this minor victory, the British anti-vax movement surged forward. I found an excerpt from one of their magazines published right after this point. The goal seems to be to herald their first major victory over the evils of vaccines. I'm going to ham this up a little bit for you. Please do. I might try to do an accent.

We'll see if that's a good idea. We'll know pretty quickly. Well, I hope. A moiety and horrible monster with the horns of a bull, the hind of a horse, the jaws of a kraken, the teeth and claws of a tiger, the tail of a cow and all the evils of Pandora's box in his belly, plague, pestilence, leprosy, purple blotches, fetid ulcers and filthy running sores covering his body. And an atmosphere of accumulated disease, pain and death around him has made his appearance

in the world and avowers mankind, especially poor, helpless infants, not by sores only or hundreds or thousands, but by hundreds of thousands. This monster has been named vaccination and his progressive havoc among the human race has been dreadful and most alarming. Yet, strange to tell, this monster has found not only a multitude of friends but worshipers who prostrate themselves before him and encourage his voracious appetite. Do not the men, the heroes, who first dared to stand forth to arrest the progress and stop the fatal havoc of this most dreadful and destructive monster and at length have

bravely subdued and put him to flight with all his mighty host, Meritan Obelisk, created to their fame with their names inscribed upon it in indelible characters to be held in grateful remembrance through all future generations. Do they know they're describing smallpox? The disease? What do they think smallpox is? Not as bad as getting vaccinated for smallpox? What they're doing is describing it like a Satanist cult, like worshiping the disease.

I think some of it comes from just the assumption that, well, I won't get smallpox when it comes through town because I'm special. But if I get the vaccine, I'll get kind of sick. And so it's worse than... I mean, that's so similar. There's some art that accompanies this passage. You know that monster with the tail of a cow and the claws and teeth of a tiger? They drew it.

Okay, I'll describe it a little. So what I assume is a cow with an alligator mouth and lots of tiny teeth. And then people trying to get in... Oh, no, they're... It looks like it's got nipples or... I'm not sure if those are nipples or sores on the side. I think they're sores because they're like bleeding pus. So people are...

I see what it is now. What I assume are doctors and pro-vaxxers with horns are pouring babies, tiny babies into its mouth, and then it's shitting them out. The cow creature is shitting out the babies. The cow alligator is shitting out the babies. Wow. Yeah, it's pretty great. That's a good logo.

Yeah, we'll have this up on the site behind the bastards.com. And since we just had a cow alligator shitting dead babies, I think the only appropriate thing to do is an ad break. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

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He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

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We're back. Boy. Those products really took the taste of that sore filled cow legator out of my mouth. Now it's back in my mouth. Now it's back in your mouth. Yeah. I mean, it's just right there. Look at that thing.

I just. Pretty cool. Pretty cool drawing. I kind of love it, but not for its purpose. Not for its purpose, but you got to appreciate a good real horrifying political cartoon. Now back in the United States, despite its early head start, the anti-vaccine movement was not a significant force for most of the 1800s. After vaccinations introduction at the start of the century, the smallpox virus was almost

eradicated in America by the 1820s or so, but it came roaring back in the 1870s because so many people stopped vaccinating themselves. Since the general vaccine was only good for five to seven years, regular vaccinations were required in order to maintain a city's herd immunity. And this is where things get a little muddier in terms of blame because the earliest American vaccine refusers kind of had a point. Vaccination was undoubtedly worth it on a societal level, but it caused significant human suffering.

Seeing the general vaccine still made you sick, and some people died from it. It was not nearly as bad as smallpox, but many, particularly white Americans, did not believe they needed to suffer through that. Since by the late 1800s, smallpox was widely considered to be a disease suffered from and spread by black people. One of its many nicknames was the inward itch. Now, yeah, we're talking about America in the 1870s, we're going to be diving into some hardcore racism.

Some like racism that David Duke would look at and be like, guys, too far, that's far. So when smallpox outbreaks would hit cities, large numbers of particularly affluent Americans would often refuse vaccination. Families would also hide their sick family members rather than turning them over to pox houses where they'd basically sit in a prison for weeks and either recover or die. That's what happened when you caught smallpox, especially if you were poor. Black families were particularly likely to hide their ill kin because of course the pox houses for black people were always poorly maintained and terrifying, sick prisons and

you would almost definitely die. Yeah, early anti-vaccine sentiment then was not so much a rejection of vaccines as it was a fear of getting sick mixed with racism and an understandable fear of racism. But in short order, an understandable impulse morphed into an ideology familiar to anyone who's listened to Jenny McCarthy lately. Here's Discover Magazine. In 1879, after a visit to New York by William Tebb, the leading British anti-vaccinationist, the Anti-Vaccination Society of America was founded.

Subsequently, the New England Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League was formed in 1882 and the Anti-Vaccine League of New York City in 1885. Using pamphlets, court battles and vigorous fights on the floor of state legislatures, the anti-vaccinationists succeeded in repealing compulsory vaccination laws in California, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin. A continual battle was waged between public health authorities and the anti-vaccinationists. With the anti-vaccinationists battling vaccination in the courts and instigating riots in Montreal and Milwaukee, there was also a riot in Rio de Janeiro.

There were like riots over vaccinations. People like shot at each other over vaccinations. That's crazy. It was fighting in the streets. Yeah. Over vaccinations. Over vaccinations. Now, this might make a little bit more sense in a little while.

Being Americans, the anti-vaxxers also made political cartoons. Ours were not as subtle or as artistic as the European ones. You want to describe that, Hannah? So we've got a snake labeled vaccination. Just written right on the side in big letters. Yeah. This is a bad drawing. It's a really bad political cartoon.

It's hissing at a mother and her infant child. And then behind the snake is a skeleton in a veil, which I must assume is death. And then over top, it says, do not vaccinate. Now, what do you think the message of that cartoon is, Hannah? I really think that it's about the economy. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I'm getting from that.

Yeah. I think it's about the economy. The inequality. The collapse of the banking system in the 1870s. That's what I read from it. Yeah. That's what I read from it, too. Yeah.

A lot of subtleties in that giant snake with vaccination written capital letters on the side. I'm sorry. That's a bad political cartoon. It's so fat. That's not an effective cartoon. Whoever drew that shouldn't be making them. Also, the mom has a really shitty face.

She's got a shitty hair. She's got a really shitty face. Yeah. Yeah. The baby looks weird. Fan of the skeleton. I'm a fan of the skeleton. That's the best part.

That's the best part. I would love to see the world where it's just skeletons and veils. I want to imagine the editor talking to this cartoonist being like, no, the snake with vaccination written on the side isn't clear enough. Skeleton. Yeah. We need a skeleton up in there. I'm still not getting it.

Just put a label at the very top with two exclamation points. Just two. All caps. All caps. By the turn of the century, the federal organization in charge of stopping the spread of smallpox in America was the United States Marine Hospital Service. This was a quasi-military organization, and it needed to be. Resistance to vaccination in American cities was often violent.

Starting in the late 1890s, a new strain of smallpox began racing through communities in the American South. It was milder and less deadly, which sounds like a good thing, but it was not necessarily a good thing. Diseases that mutate into less deadly versions can just as easily mutate into something more lethal, so it's still just as important to eradicate infestations when they start. However, the fact that the new smallpox killed fewer people acted as fuel for the anti-vaccine movement.

This smallpox barely kills anyone. Why should we vaccinate our kids against it? So the fact that this new strain of smallpox had a reputation for infecting, quote, none-but-negros also had another major impact. Oh, god. Yeah. I can totally see how it goes. Yeah.

So rather than being wiped out when it started to spread, this new smallpox virus burnt through the southeast like a Texas wildfire. Here's the book, Pox. An itch, some called it, or Puerto Rico scratch. Manila scab, Filipino itch, Mexican bump, inward itch, Italian itch, Hungarian itch, camp itch, army itch, elephant itch, kangaroo itch, cedar itch, bean pox, or simply bumps. Really curious about why kangaroos came into it. Was it about Australia where they're like only the outlaws in Australia?

Those filthy Australians are bringing in the smallpox. Maybe it was directed at Indigenous people in Australia. After all of the racism and the preceding two-thirds of that, the idea that they might have just hated Australians is almost wholesome. It is almost wholesome. It's almost wholesome. The kangaroo itch might. I feel like someone's going to call us out on that and be like, no, no, no, no, no.

No, kangaroo is a racial slur for the Portuguese. Exactly. It's really mean. Oh, god. Was it affecting Cuba and Puerto Rico? I mean, it affected everywhere. It spread through the world like wildfire. One of the reasons why there is this myth that black people are more likely to get it

is that particularly black minstrel shows traveled a lot throughout this area, and so these people would be traveling, and people who travel a lot are more likely to spread diseases and stuff, so that was one reason. But it was also a lot of it was just racism. They would just say, well, it must have been a black guy who brought the disease to town just because they were racist. Yeah, it's like how immigrants bring crime today. Yeah, exactly.

That's what they do. That's what they do. That's my parents came here and said, it's time to rob. And you know, only 24, 25% of our doctors are immigrants, and I feel like as a country, if there's one thing we can lose, it's a quarter of our doctors. Oh, yeah. What are doing? We're healthy.

Yeah, we're fine. We're fine. We're doing great. I do listen to that, and I'm like, oh, my desire to not get a flu shot is not too far off from them being like, it's just baby smallpox. It's just baby smallpox. No, I mean, we all, like that's, you can see why it spreads. Like these are all, you know, I don't get the flu shot as often as I ought to.

Because I'm like, I won't get the flu shot. I trust that my eating expired muscles and clams on a regular basis will keep me safe from everything. Yeah. So far it has. I have had, I'm one of the only people you'll probably meet who's had a polio and a smallpox vaccination. Oh, yeah.

Because I've traveled in some places where it's like, you might want to get a polio vaccination. Like some shit's been going down here. No harm, no foul. Yeah. Yeah. Smallpox vaccination does suck. Did you get the flu? No, no, but it, like your arm is fucked up for a while.

How long? I don't know, like four or five days. Like it just sucks. Sure. Yeah. Okay. So since every white person in America was racist as fuck back then, and since smallpox was seen as a disease spread by non-white people, most Southern communities responded

to outbreaks by restricting the mobility of their black citizens even more, often quarantining the black parts of town when an outbreak started. This of course led to black people hiding their sick family members from vaccination corps doctors. Racism also meant that many communities failed to take the outbreak seriously. In 1897, when smallpox began raging in the black neighborhood of Middlesboro, Kentucky, white people basically ignored the problem at first. The local newspaper wrote, quote, up to the present, no white people have been attacked

and there is positively no occasion for alarm. There was. Thank God. That was something like people got it there. It was a terrible, terrible outbreak. Unlike everyone else back then, smallpox was not racist and it quickly spread through both black and white homes. It was a very woke illness.

That's a good line. Wokepox. Yeah. Very good line. The Marine Hospital service sent over doctors to contain the outbreak since local authorities had failed horribly. The city was, quote, from the bookpox, divided into five districts, one inspector to each make a house-to-house canvas.

A local newspaper boasted awkwardly that the services inspection showed that, quote, outside of smallpox, this is the healthiest town on the globe. What? They examined everyone, vaccinating the few unscarred people they found. Someone who refused the vaccination order was promptly turned over to the city authorities, who gave the violator the option of being vaccinated or taken to jail. This was, quote, something of a moot question because if the uncooperating person shows jail, they are vaccinated as soon as they enter under a law requiring all inmates of

jails to be vaccinated. Oh my God, I kind of love that. Yeah, it's pretty great. Many who resisted were simply handcuffed and vaccinated literally at gunpoint. Police would show up and be like, no, you're going to get the fucking shot right now. Yeah. Like, would shoot you. When infected people were found in a home, all clothing and bedding was burnt.

The house would be pumped full of sulfur smoke in order to sterilize it. If the home was too old and drafty to be effectively sterilized this way, the vaccination core would just burn it down. Whoa. It was like a part of this. We just got to burn down this whole block. Fuck it. I understand, A, how that was effective, but also, B, how that made people be like, ugh.

It's not like today where someone's just reading nonsense on the internet and decides not to vaccinate their kid. Right. People showing up at your door with guns and cutting your arm and burning down houses and you don't like them. Yeah. It's like, okay. Burning down houses is a lot.

I get why you might not trust these people. It's not unreasonable. I think the people burning down the house in this case are overall on the right. I get the resistance. A.T. McCormick was a member of the Kentucky Board of Health. The Middlesboro Outbreak was a major black mark on his organization's name because they basically ignored shit when it started and then failed to provide adequate resources to fight the epidemic.

In order to save face, McCormick blamed black people, announcing that, quote, the exemption of the white race from this mild strain of smallpox was over, and quote, visiting in strange Negroes should be hunted, vaccinated, and kept under observation. Jesus Christ. Again. Not all good guys on this side. So during outbreaks, local governments would force community members to provide proof of vaccination.

Failure to do so could result in fines, usually between $5 and $100. Court jail terms were also common, but local judges would also force people to work on chain gangs. In one instance, in North Carolina, a vaccine refuser who threatened to spread smallpox to his political enemies had, quote, three buggy whips worn out on him. They were within people sometimes for this. Everything is hardcore in the late 1800s. Nobody half asses anything.

Which is weird too because it's also the era of female propriety and just being proper in general and that Victorian sensibility. What side of, so this is also the area in which the feminist movement is very first starting to come in. Which side of this do you think they wind up on? Oh God. Are they anti-vaxxed? It's not great.

They were racist too, so. Well, no, actually. That's part of what makes this fucked, I mean, some of them were, but that's part of what, we're getting to that. So, while vaccination was a clear good and a necessary thing, many of its major advocates were bastards, and this is where the story gets kind of weird because a lot of the first American anti-vaccine advocates were not idiots and kooks. Many of them were progressives who supported women's suffrage and anti-racist policies

and were reacting to the racism that was often present in vaccination campaigns. Well, the first anti-vaxx movement in England was a working class thing. The American anti-vaxx movement was an affluent left-wing movement. So basically, right-wing authoritarian assholes like the governments in small towns Southern America were pro-vaccine but also used the threat of smallpox to further oppress black people and generally went about ensuring vaccine laws were complied with in the most brutal way possible. Meanwhile, a lot of leftists were anti-vaccine, which was insanely dangerous, but they were

also reacting to a lot of the bigotry that was wrapped up in the whole thing. Wow, that's very complicated. It's fucking wild. It really is. Jesus. Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist, stood against compulsory vaccination. He believed that mandatory vaccines were an encroachment on people's freedom of choice. Because they were, like, whipping people.

Whipping people at burning down houses. You can see why someone would be on the other side of that. Leo Tolstoy was an anti-vaccine sympathizer, agreeing with the cause for the same reason he agreed with quote, every struggle for liberty in any sphere of life. These were not always high-minded arguments about freedom. George Bernard Shaw called vaccination a peculiarly filthy piece of witchcraft. If you're a fan of a great author or poet or civil rights leader from the late 1800s or early 1900s, there's a weirdly good chance they were anti-vaccine advocates.

The bookpox says that these people were part of a now mostly defunct American intellectual tradition called libertarian radicalism. These folks aren't libertarians in the sense that we're used to. Most of what they advocated had nothing to do with economics, and, you know, Ayn Rand hadn't been born yet. Yeah. They were more focused on personal freedom, which made them great on issues like letting women vote and arguing that black people shouldn't be murdered by cops, but made them

bad on vaccination, quote from the bookpox. The same men and women who joined anti-vaccination leagues tended to throw themselves into other maligned causes of their era, including anti-imperialism, women's rights, anti-vivisection, vegetarianism, Henry George's single tax, the fight against government censorship of obscene materials under the late 19th century Comstock laws and opposition to state eugenics. Interesting. Yeah. It's really complicated.

Well, I mean, I get it because the way it was compulsory vaccination wasn't forced was problematic. Yeah. Problematic even when it's like necessary, when it's like, no, thousands of people will die if we're not burning down houses and like forcing. Right. Yeah, you're right. We're not burning down houses.

Yeah. Who got burned down? Rich people didn't get their houses burned down. Yeah. Rich people didn't get forced at gunpoint, probably. Yeah. And there were some doctors shot doing this too. Like it was hardcore shit.

Like you could do a pretty good like showtime original series about like being a hardboiled vaccine doctor. How does that show not exist? I don't know, but I think Woody Harrelson would be a great two-fisted vaccine doctor. Very good. Cutting, fucking razor blade in one hand, cutting people's arms and shooting at others. Yes. Oh, I would watch that show.

Oh, man. Oh, well, okay. If anyone's listening. If anyone's listening. That's a hot idea. That's a hot ticket. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

I'll write your scripts. I don't know how to write scripts. But you can definitely consult. I'll draw a crude picture of Woody Harrelson being a badass vaccine doctor. It'll be great. And it'll have similarities to the cow, cowligator. It's going to look a lot like the cowligator. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So this story that I expected I'd wind up telling when I first started researching the anti-vaccine movement, part of the story is that, yes, we are still very dumb and refuse to use life-saving medicine for dumb reasons, but it's just more complicated than that. The fact that being anti-vax was more reasonable in the late 1800s and early 1900s meant that it was also more popular. Like I said, there were enormous anti-vaccine riots in cities around North and South America.

Then as today, parents who suffered tragic losses or health issues with their kids formed a crucial core of the movement. In 1896, Laura Little of Minneapolis lost her seven-year-old son. She claimed that the smallpox vaccine is what killed him, even though he died seven months after being vaccinated. So it wasn't? I mean, no, it was not. But at the time, who knows?

There's not much science back then. Right. But seven months later, it's like, hmm, he probably got sick. What it was is he got sick from the vaccine, because that's what the vaccine did. Right. And then he got sick again shortly thereafter. And I think to her, it just looked like he was sick continually after it, even though like, lady, it's 1896, half of the kids die.

Kids just die for no reason. It's 1896. Lady, it's your fault for naming him. Yeah, he shouldn't have named him. That was a bad call. Speaking of not naming babies, Anna, are you a fan of products and services? Yeah. Okay.

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I'll try them. You know what else you should try? Vaccination. Ugh, fine. I'll get a flu shot. I won't. I keep being like, I don't work with kids anymore. I do if I'm going to a family reunion and I know I'm going to be around old people.

You do? Well, I don't want to get my old, my elderly relative sick because they could die from that shit. I would have never even thought about that. Yeah, that's the main reason. I don't care. My roommates are also early 30s, late 20s. We all get each other sick once a year.

It's whatever. Exactly. I don't want to get someone who could die from the flu sick. I'm so selfish that when I was teaching kindergarten, I got the flu shot only because I was like, they're going to get me sick. At no point was I like, it's for them. When I taught special ed, I never got sick and I never got vaccinated just because you're exposed to it.

That's true. I was sick for six months. I was sick a lot. Me too. And then after that, I was like fucking iron. I had like strep. I was sick all the time. And then yeah.

You're just like invulnerable. Right. I don't give a shit. The zombie plague can hit tomorrow. I'll fight that shit off. It's like, how do people not believe immunity by exposure is a thing when literally that is what happens in life? Yeah.

That's why teachers are so terrifying and powerful. That's why. That's why. Don't fuck with them. Yeah. Laura Little of Minneapolis lost her little kid and then became a major anti-vaccine advocate. She became the editor of a magazine called The Liberator, an early anti-vax pro-fringe medicine magazine, basically the natural news of its day.

Now you may also recognize there was an earlier liberator in the abolitionist era before the Civil War. It was like an abolitionist newspaper. She named her anti-vaccine newspaper The Liberator because she saw anti-vaccination advocacy as part of the same intellectual tradition as abolitionism. And it kind of was. A lot of the same people. A lot of the older people in the active vaccine movement, pre-Civil War, had been abolitionists.

I guess it's tough now. Yeah. It's getting tough. It's complicated. It's really complicated because these are not bad people. They're wrong about this, but they're like, in 1896 being like, lady, you should vote. Racism's bad. No one else is saying that.

Yeah. But they're also saying the smallpox vaccine is the devil. It's out of step with how science works. Yeah. But again, science wasn't great at this point. Right. Still. Even still.

That's right. Yeah. So Laura did work in The Liberator that did verge on real journalism. She interviewed the parents of children who died as a result of vaccinations gone wrong and kids did die as a result. This is the fucking 1890s. It was not nearly as good as it is now. The error rate was a lot higher.

One of her books was titled Crimes of the Cowpox Ring. Some moving pictures thrown on the dead wall of official silence. Solid title. Yeah. Anti-vaccine advocates had other tactics besides rioting. Many of them would protect their kids by giving them fake vaccination scars. Or if they couldn't stop their kid from being vaccinated, they would attempt to scrub the vaccine out of the arm after it was inserted.

I'm sorry. Both those things are horrible. Yes. Horrible. Now, it would probably be unfair to call the people who did that anti-vaxxers. They were anti their kids getting vaccinated because they didn't want their kid to get sick. But the anti-vaccine movement as an ideological movement was a very different thing.

And it was more wrapped up in like freedom of choice and resistance to racism and that sort of thing. So, it's wonky. Many early anti-vaxxers were doctors or at least doctors doing the hand quote sign. Because again, the late 1800s and early 1900s was the period in which medicine was starting to become real. Up until that point, to most Americans, a doctor of homeopathy was probably just as credible as a Stanford surgeon.

Most medicine was just whiskey and hammers at this point. So, people were not nearly as dumb as they are today for distrusting medical science. Were they letting blood then? Oh, yeah. All the time. Wow. You know, that's not always the bad thing to do. But like this is the point where anyone can call themselves a doctor and the medical community

was just starting to figure out, okay, well, some of us are actually doctors and some of us are charlatans. And like a lot of the charlatans wound up on the anti-vaccine side of things because they were pro-natural medicine or whatever. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I think it's echoed today in how we trust doctors and how younger doctors are using newer technology and newer strategies, but the older doctors aren't always doing the best thing for you.

Yeah. Now, there was a lot of reason to distrust the credible doctors and mainstream medical science at this point. One thing that would have been in living memory for many of the people doing this was during the Civil War, Robert E. Lee's Army, the Army of Northern Virginia, had 5,000 men rendered combat ineffective before the Battle of Chancellorsville because when they'd been vaccinated, the doctor had accidentally used part of a syphilis or in order to make the vaccine. Oh, my God.

So they all got syphilis? So they all got syphilis? Oh, my God. It's okay to laugh. They're confederates. Yeah, that's true. That does feel like karma. That does feel like karma.

I mean, everybody died then, but wow, that's crazy. That is crazy. Did that doctor get stoned to death? He would hope so, right? Like even though, like, that's a pretty big error. Maybe he wasn't in search yet. Oh, yeah. Maybe he was like a...

That's the movie or the show that I want to see. That's the show. Like a doctor, like, infecting the confederate army with syphilis. That's such a smart strategy. That's a really smart... Because that 5,000 men, that's like a fucking... That's like half a division or something like that. That's a lot of combat strength lost.

Pretty cool. Yeah. Pretty cool. But for the people in this era, that would have been a famous example of like, well, you can't trust these doctors. I don't want my kid getting syphilis. Right. And she's like, well, yeah, you know, that did happen.

So you've got all these doctors who are chiropractors and homeopaths, and they are basically fighting a war within the medical establishment with what we know today is real doctors, but we're at that time not a whole lot more credible, you know? The vice president of the Anti-Vaccination Society of America was what was known as a botanical physician. He prefers to use natural plant-based medicine rather than pharmaceutical drugs and, you know, mercury. This guy, Dr. Kleimer, wrote a tract called Vaccination Brought Home to You.

These sources were mainstream medical textbooks, which talked extensively about the very real side effects of that era's vaccines. So he's basically taking books written by his professional rifles and cherry picking the evidence that made them look bad to an uneducated mass. Another made, yeah. Well. Smart. Yeah.

Not a bad strategy. Another major anti-vaccine advocate was Dr. J.W. Hodge, a homeopath in Niagara Falls. In one speech in 1902, he stated, compulsory vaccination ranks with human slavery and religious persecution is one of the most flagrant outrages upon the rights of the human race. So these physicians and laymen and women, anti-vaxxers, blanketed the nation in pamphlets and books outlining their case against vaccination. According to the book, POCS, quote, violent imagery pervaded the anti-vaccination texts. The frontist piece of Kleimer's book pictured a police officer armed with a copy of the

vaccination law, seizing a baby from its mother's lap while the angel of death waited with open arms. Laura Little found material enough in the public record, quote, it is for this hellish work that churches, theaters, and business blocks in whole neighborhoods have been raided, she wrote. Ocean liners, populations cowpoxed, a shipload of Negro laborers driven off the vessel with clubs at Panama and poisoned in spite of resistance, arrests have been made and innocent persons cast into jail and they're jabbed with the virus, and, most atrocious of all, the annual

army of babies graduating from nursery into school are required to bear their little arms and receive this injection of disease. For middle-class anti-vaccinationists, the plight of the working-class vaccine-refusers pinioned by police officers and vaccinated-revealed the tyranny and despotism of the entire system of state medicine. If this can be done and upheld by the legal machinery of this state, what next have we to expect? Asked Kleimer.

Why not chase people and circumcise them? It surely would be a good preventative against certain kinds of disease. Why not catch the people and give each a compulsory bath? So again, this is not even when kooks are bringing up, these are some real questions to ask. This is the first time a society had dealt with this, like how much do you intervene? It is a valid question, and I see how compulsory vaccination, in its form, spurred that question. Individual rights.

It did. Now, the anti-vaccine movement saw an enormous success for a time. By the early 1900s, the U.S. was known as the least vaccinated of any, quote, civilized country. It means, you know, the white country. And however, high-minded their arguments, lack of vaccination was just as likely to cause deadly outbreaks then as it is now. In March of 1900, the town of Jonesville, Mississippi, was hit by an especially brutal

variant of the smallpox virus. 75% of the people who caught thispox died from it. And since vaccination rates were so low in Jonesville, it was not uncommon for whole families to be wiped out and just found dead in their homes, obliterated entire family lines. So this is, again, most of what's hitting in this period is the less deadly version of smallpox, but every now and then you'll have one of these murder variants creep up, which is why it's so important to vaccinate people.

And this is why the doctors who are burning down houses are like, no, I really need to be burning down houses and like forcing people at gunpoint to do this. That's interesting. It seems like there is this push and pull at least up until this point of like, once people start to forget how deadly the virus is, they don't need vaccination. And that's when it comes back and Jonesville, Mississippi gets wiped out. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, Utah and its largely Mormon citizenry were eager converts to the anti-vaccine cause. They also had a nightmarish smallpox outbreak in 1900, 3000 people caught the disease, 26 of them died. So that was the fortunately one of the less deadly variants of it. In 1903, a group of Michigan anti-vaxxers led by Laura Little had a Brexit level legislative surprise victory when they passed a bill that made it illegal to compel any child to get vaccinated or require vaccination to let a child into school. The state's doctors were outraged and succeeded in getting the bill amended to allow them to

at least force vaccinations during an outbreak. As you'd expect, the anti-vaccine victory in Michigan was followed three years later by a nightmarish smallpox epidemic, 28,000 people got sick. Whoa. That's so much. Again, I'm not going to say Laura Little's a bad person, but she got 28,000 people sick with smallpox. Yeah.

For a good reason. She wasn't a, fuck, you get a lot of credit for me if you're not racist in 1903 and you're a white lady. Like that's not common. Yeah. Well, who knows? Maybe she was. Maybe she was.

She was woken by their standards. She was bad to like force black people off of boats and reject them with drugs against their will, which most people would have been like, well, they don't have a right to say no. Yeah. Yeah. Oh gosh, this is so tangled up. It's really tangled up.

Yeah. Anti-vaccine advocates were, as you might expect, pretty likely to die of smallpox. Putnam J. Ramsdell of Cambridge, Massachusetts was a prominent Christian scientist and anti-vaxxer. When he died in 1902, the New York Times reported that he had, quote, died of the disease he defied. Wow. Yeah. Here's Pox.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, five vaccine refusers died of the disease later that year. In June, 1903, on the very same day that the Minnesota legislature enacted the anti-compulsion law he had championed, the Minneapolis anti-vaccinationist, Charles Stevens, died of smallpox at his home. So these people are often like dying while they're advocating against the vaccine. This is like when people are against public-funded health care. Yeah. It's like, yeah, just wait till you get cancer.

Just wait till you can't afford treatment. Yeah. Or wait till your fucking barista spreads a deadly disease to you because they couldn't afford to take the day off of work because they don't get sick. Yeah. Well. It's coming. Okay.

Yeah. So the most interesting side of this to me is the sort of conflict between all these pro and anti-vaccine doctors. This battle came to a head in the story of Dr. Samuel Durkin. He was a lecturer at Harvard and chairman of the Boston Board of Health. He was a real doctor. Now Massachusetts was, at this time, going through its worst smallpox outbreak in generations. And Durkin, as a young man, had lived through an outbreak that had killed like 1,000 people.

So he, like, hated smallpox. Okay. Well, I mean, that seems like it's what it takes. Yeah. Is to see hundreds of people die? Yeah. Yeah. One causal factor was that in 1894, anti-vaccine advocates had secured their equivalent to

the conscientious objector exemption, allowing parents to secure a doctor's note saying their child was unfit for vaccination. Since there were plenty of anti-vax doctors, any parent could find a physician willing to exempt their kid. So while this epidemic was infecting hundreds of people and spreading into Boston, a newsletter started going around town advising parents to exempt their children from vaccination, stating, quote, there are hundreds of physicians in Massachusetts who are well aware of the uselessness and evil effects of vaccination.

When the Boston Globe reached out to Dr. Durkin about this newsletter, he issued a challenge, quote, if there are among the adult and leading members of the anti-vaccinationists who would like an opportunity to show the people their sincerity in what they profess, I will make arrangements by which that belief may be tested and the effect of such an exhibition of faith by exposure to smallpox without vaccination be made clear. So he's like, come at me, anti-vax doctors. Yeah. We'll take you to a smallpox ward and see if your methods of avoiding smallpox work better

than a fucking vaccine. Well, their method is, I'll never go there. Well, no, I mean, their method, they had all these kooky things about like, no, no, you just got to exercise and eat vegetables and stuff like the doctors aren't like people like people like Laura little are ideologically being like this, it's wrong to force vaccines. A lot of these doctors are being like, no, no, no, homeopathy will keep you safe. Right. Listen to me.

My profession is right. My profession is right. So Durkin straight up hated the anti-vaccine movement and he particularly reviled the men who called themselves doctors among that crowd. He called anti-vaxxers, quote, a class of men whose minds are so curiously constituted that they will select for study the nether side of the social fabric, the weakness of the best of governments and the minor defects in the character of the world's heroes. Emmanuel Pfeiffer was one of these doctors.

He was a major advocate of kook medicine as well as an anti-vaxxer. Back in April of that year, he'd argued in court that the state should not interfere with, quote, any Cosmopath, clairvoyant, hypnotist, magnetic healer, mind curist, cure, osteopath, or Christian scientist. Oh. Shots fired. Yeah. Shots fired.

Don't know what a Cosmopath is, but real excited about that word. Someone who believes your diseases come from the stars at the. That's what we're going to choose to go with. Yeah. That feels like it. Now, Pfeiffer was a registered physician who believed he could cure, quote, all kinds of chronic diseases just by simple laying on of hands. He was.

What? He was a health nut and believed that good diet, proper exercise, and moral behavior were enough to protect you from a disease like smallpox. In 1902, he took Dr. Durgan up on his offer and went to visit the smallpox ward on Gallup's island. Less than two weeks later, Dr. Pfeiffer disappeared. Suddenly this very public man who had abandoned his practice and dropped off the face of the earth, Dr. Durgan launched a five day manhunt to find him, which eventually revealed that

he'd gotten tremendously ill from smallpox and was dying in a farmhouse. So what happened after this? This is what I'm going to tell you. When they found him, the board of health announced that he probably would not survive. Here's pox, quote, How many had been exposed to smallpox in these days between Pfeiffer's disappearance and the arrival of the health officials at his Bedford bedside? No one knew. Bedford officials placed the Pfeiffer farm under quarantine, ordering all on the premises

vaccinated, learning that Pfeiffer's two daughters had been to school since his arrival. Officials ordered all the town's pupils to get vaccinated or stay home. Boston authorities tracked down two carriages in which Pfeiffer had traveled and disinfected them. All of the residents of the Charleston apartment house were vaccinated. To everyone's surprise, except perhaps his own, Emmanuel Pfeiffer's famous constitution pulled him back from the brink of death, and he began his long recovery. The race for the moral high ground began even before his survival was assured.

Durgan announced that several other physicians had visited Gallup's Island that season and having previously been vaccinated, none came down with smallpox. Now a lot of people attacked Durgan after this and were like, dude, you just gave a new guy smallpox and he went wandering around the world and infected a bunch of people. That's not good medicine. Which is a fair point. That's a fair point, but I can see both sides latching on to a different read of what happened here.

And they sure as shit did. Yeah. Dr. Pfeiffer's anti-vaccine sentiments did not change, and in fact, he used this, the fact that he'd survived is proof that he was right all along, even though he got horribly ill and very nearly died. Nobody changes their minds based on evidence, Anna. No, that's true. Yeah.

But the United States at least drifted further and further away from supporting quack medicine after this point. Roughly a year after this, another Massachusetts man, Pastor Jacobson, would be charged with refusing a mandatory vaccine during an outbreak. He was taken to court, convicted, and found guilty of the crime of refusing vaccination. Jacobson appealed and his case eventually made its way up to the Supreme Court. When they ruled on Jacobson v. Massachusetts in 1905, the ability of the government to compel vaccinations, even with the use of police force, was upheld.

This decision, along with the fact that vaccines grew more effective and less terrible over the next few decades, led to the gradual extinction of the American anti-vax movement, at least for a while. Now, there's a really fucked up code to this. Because when eugenics became a thing, which starts right after this point, 1910s and 20s is when the American eugenics movement starts sterilizing tens of thousands of people. You want to guess what their main legal cited precedent is? Compulsory.

Compulsory vaccination. Oh, no. Compulsory people. To stop the spread of sickness, why can't we sterilize people to stop the spread of sickness? Wow. So again, all of this is tangled up and fucked up. So I guess compulsory anything is like you're on a slippery slope.

And you don't always, a slippery slope does not always mean things because we have compulsory vaccination today and we don't sterilize people for no good reasons today. It's just like how, you know, but you can opt out today also. Some places. Some places you can't. And that may be changing with all the outbreaks that have happened. It's sort of like how when Ulysses Simpson Grant passed the anti-KKK Act that allowed the government to arrest people for essentially what were their political opinions, it could

have gone on a slippery slope and led to an authoritarian regime. But instead it just led to a bunch of clansmen getting jailed. So it's fine. We don't always go down the slippery slope. Sometimes you just have to be very careful with the actions you're taking. Right. Measured. Measured.

So that was a morally complicated and confusing episode. Next episode, which we'll be running tomorrow for you, we're going to talk about something that's not morally confusing and we will be talking about a real bastard, a guy named Andrew Wakefield. Ooh. Looking forward to getting a little bit less ambiguity. Yeah. I didn't know which side to take.

There's no side to take. It's just an important story if you're going to, we're really getting behind the bastards here. Yes. Truly. This is the behind the behind. Yeah. Tomorrow, next episode, we'll just be talking about a bastard.

So yeah. All right. That's the episode. What do I do at the end of an episode? Oh God. Oh God. Panic. Panic.

Panic. Anna. Plugables. You can check my webcomic out on Instagram. It's bad comics with an X by Anna. Two ends. And that's also my handle on Twitter. Follow me on the social medias.

And if you have a interpretation of that cartoon that we saw and described, tell us about it. Yeah, please do. It'll be up on our website, behindthebastards.com. You can find us on social media and Twitter and the gram at at Bastards Pod. The kids call out the gram, Anna. I didn't know if you... I didn't call it IG.

Whoa. That's even faster. Yeah. What about just G? Oh. Find us on the G at at Bastards Pod. You can find me on Twitter at I write okay and nowhere else because Instagram frightens and confuses me.

Then you're missing out on my comics. No. I see your comics on your Twitter. I occasionally post on my Twitter. You tweet some comics. Yeah, that's true. You can also buy a shirt. You can buy cups.

You can buy stickers. You can buy smallpox vaccines from behindthebastardshop on tpublic.com. They're less vaccines and more smallpox infected t-shirts, but they work probably the same way. Yeah. I probably shouldn't say that our shirts have smallpox. Well, just delete this part. No, you can't edit audio, Anna.

Oh, yeah. Oh, God. I hope this is going in. But I already ordered six t-shirts. Well, just make sure you give them to people who spend a lot of time around cows. They'll probably be fine. Yeah. Milkmaids.

Milkmaids. All right. That's the end of the show. Go home. Do something else. I love you. 40%. Goodbye.

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