The Origins of Anti-Vaccination Movement

Fear of vaccines and myths against them are not a new phenomenon. Opposition to vaccines goes as far back as the 18th century when, for example, Reverend Edmund Massey in England called the vaccines “diabolical operations” in his 1772 sermon, “The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation”. He decried these vaccines as an attempt to oppose God’s punishments upon man for his sins. Similar religious opposition was seen in the “New World” even earlier, such as in the writings of Reverend John Williams in Massachusetts, who also cited similar reasons for his opposition to vaccines claiming that they were the devil’s work. However, opposition against vaccines was not only manifested in theological arguments; many also objected to them for political and legal reasons.

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For some parents, the smallpox vaccination itself induced fear and protest. It included scoring the flesh on a child’s arm and inserting lymph from the blister of a person who had been vaccinated about a week earlier. Some objectors, including the local clergy, believed that the vaccine was “unchristian” because it came from an animal. For other anti-vaccinators, their discontent with the smallpox vaccine reflected their general distrust in medicine and in Jenner’s ideas about disease spread. Suspicious of the vaccine’s efficacy, some sceptics alleged that smallpox resulted from decaying matter in the atmosphere. Lastly, many people objected to vaccination because they believed it violated their personal liberty, a tension that worsened as the government developed mandatory vaccine policies.

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After the passage of laws in Britain in the mid-19th century making it mandatory for parents to vaccinate their children, anti-vaccine activists formed the Anti-Vaccination League in London. The league emphasized that its mission was to protect the liberties of the people which were being “invaded” by Parliament and its compulsory vaccination laws. Eventually, the pressure exerted by the league and its supporters compelled the British Parliament to pass an act in 1898, which removed penalties for not abiding by vaccination laws and allowed parents who did not believe vaccination was beneficial or safe to not have their children vaccinated. Since the rise and spread of the use of vaccines, opposition to vaccines has never completely gone away, vocalized intermittently in different parts of the world due to arguments based in theology, scepticism, and legal obstacles.

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The anti-vaccination movement threatens to undo years of progress made against a range of preventable diseases. Mass immunization campaigns helped slash the number of measles deaths worldwide by 80 percent between 2000 and 2017, but that headway may now be stalling. Today, only 85 percent of the world’s infants receive the first dose of the treatment, and even fewer get the second dose. This is well short of the 95 percent vaccination rate that the WHO says is needed to prevent outbreaks. If the anti-vaccination movement continues to gain momentum, there could be more outbreaks in places such as the United States, where measles has been considered eliminated for nearly two decades. With more cases, there will be greater potential for measles to spread across borders. Until governments turn the tide of the anti-vaccination movement, health workers will face the dual challenge of containing measles in both countries where the disease is still endemic and those where it was thought long gone.