Vaccines: A Mighty and Horrible Monster

The fear of vaccines dates back over 300 years.

A smallpox epidemic nearly cost America its freedom.

Throughout the Colonial period, smallpox regularly swept through the Colonies. Boston alone suffered smallpox outbreaks in 1721, 1730, 1752, and 1764. As America’s War for Independence erupted in 1775, smallpox was yet again emerging in Massachusetts.

In November 1775, a Continental Army marched northward from Boston to Quebec City with orders to wrest the city from the British. Traveling with the army was smallpox. By late December, most of the army’s 3,200 soldiers were suffering from the disease and unfit for duty. The British weren’t nearly as affected. Smallpox, the “speckled monster” as it was known in Britain, had ravaged Europe for centuries, providing Europeans, and British soldiers, a degree of natural immunity.

On December 30, the desperate Continental Army attacked the city. The Americans were quickly routed, and hundreds of Colonists captured. Their commander, General Richard Montgomery, died in the battle. Hoping for reinforcements, the surviving army remained in the region. Three months later, Major General John Thomas arrived to command the remaining troops. Within days, Thomas died from smallpox. Fresh British troops soon landed to reinforce the city, leaving the ruined Continental Army little choice but to flee.

The British Army routed the America Army during the 1775 Battle of Quebec.

Despondent, John Adams, the future president, wrote his wife, Abigail: “Our Misfortunes in Canada, are enough to melt a Heart of Stone. The Small Pox is ten times more terrible than Britons, Canadians, and Indians together. This was the Cause of our precipitate Retreat from Quebec . . .”

Thanks largely to smallpox, Canada would remain British.

By February 1777, General George Washington had concluded that only inoculation, an early form of vaccination, would prevent his army from being destroyed. Many states, though, had banned inoculation, primarily for religious reasons, forcing Washington to ask their governors for permission. Petitioning Virginia Governor Patrick Henry, Washington wrote that smallpox “is more destructive to an Army in the Natural way, than the Enemy’s Sword.”

Fortunately, the governors granted General Washington consent to inoculate the army. Had they not, Washington’s Colonial Army may well have suffered the same fate as General Montgomery’s in Quebec, ending the Revolutionary War and America’s dream of independence.

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Today, armies are no longer vanquished by smallpox, but concern over the safety of vaccines is on the rise. That concern is hardly new though and dates back to 1720 when inoculation was first developed. Even Benjamin Franklin distrusted the new procedure, tragically. During a smallpox epidemic in 1736, Franklin failed to inoculate his son who later died of the disease. Franklin blamed himself for his son’s death later writing in his autobiography:

“In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the smallpox taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of the parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it. . .”

Inoculation was dangerous, roughly 2 percent died from the procedure, a shocking number today, but far less than those dying of smallpox. So it’s not surprising that when Dr. Edward Jenner developed the original smallpox vaccine in 1796 skeptics warned against the new vaccine, “to guard parents against suffering their children becoming victims to experiment,” a claim familiar today. And like today, there were those who portrayed vaccines as a global menace wreaking havoc on the human race. An 1807 screed printed in London described vaccines as: “A mighty and horrible monster . . . [which] devores mankind—especially poor helpless infants . . . This monster has been named vaccination; and his progressive havoc among the human race, has been dreadful and most alarming.”

The first organized anti-vaccine movement was the Anti-Vaccination League, created in England after the passage of the Vaccination Act of 1853. The Act made smallpox vaccinations compulsory for infants and held parents liable by fine, or even imprisonment, for failing to vaccinate their children. The unpopular act led to growing protests, culminating in 1885 when 100,000 angry protestors demanded the repeal of the act. After years of study, Parliament passed the Vaccination Act of 1898. The act introduced the concept of “conscientious objector” into English law, allowing parents who objected to vaccines on religious or other grounds to exempt their children from compulsory vaccination.

An anti-vaccination cartoon published in 1894.

In 1879, the American Anti-Vaccination Society was formed after a visit by William Tebb, a British social reformer against compulsory vaccination. In 1893, Tebb published Leprosy and Vaccination in which he claimed that a recent increase in leprosy was due to smallpox vaccinations.

A century later, starting in 1998, similar claims would be made that vaccines led to autism. That year, the British physician Andrew Wakefield published a paper in the medical journal The Lancet. Dr. Wakefield’s paper claimed that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine had contributed to the rise in childhood autism over the prior four decades.

Dr. Wakefield’s claims were disproven after extensive research by multiple organizations consistently yielded no credible linkage between childhood vaccines and the claimed adverse effects. In 2010, the United Kingdom revoked Wakefield’s medical license for fraudulent claims made in his 1998 paper, “citing, among other findings, that he had not disclosed funding from lawyers suing vaccine manufacturers.”

But Andrew Wakefield’s medical decertification did little to slow the anti-vaccine movement. For years, vaccine skepticism had been propelled by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, as early as 2005, had claimed vaccines caused autism.

Yet, every major public health organization including the Autism Society, Autism Science Foundation, and the National Institutes for Health had consistently confirmed that “Vaccines are Not Associated with Autism.”

Vaccines, though, are not without risk. Current vaccine researchers are still cautioned by the 1955 Cutter Incident. Cutter Laboratories was a family-owned vaccine manufacturer. In the nation’s first mass polio vaccination program, 200,000 children were administered Cutter’s new polio vaccine. Within days, reports of paralysis began to appear. The vaccination program was quickly terminated, but not before 40,000 children had developed polio. Tragically, two-hundred children suffered permanent paralysis of varying degrees, and ten children died. Subsequent investigations determined that Cutter’s process for inactivating the live polio virus had been defective.

Polio vaccines have saved thousands of lives.

But even accounting for that tragic accident, vaccines have saved countless more lives from polio deaths. In the 1940s, a virulent new polio strain doubled death rates. Fortunately, the new polio vaccines were a stunning success. One of medical science’s greatest achievements, polio vaccines saved thousands of lives a year, and many more from paralysis and life in an “iron lung.”