As this article is being written, more than 150 million people worldwide have received the COVID 19 vaccine. China has gifted Pakistan with half a million doses and the frontline workers have already started receiving the vaccine.
However, when the first few doses were being administered it was followed by press conferences by health specialists that were emphasizing the safety of the vaccine. This points us towards one of the biggest problems that epidemiologists, frontline health workers, and government officials have had to face every time a vaccine is introduced.
The problem being the irrational minority of individuals that think vaccines are bad in some way or the other. The term anti-vaxxer is quite new in the global discourse on this subject, but there is a long-running history of anti-vaxxers across the world.
Before delving into anti-vaxxers and what they think, however, it is best to establish what exactly vaccines are and how they work in order to prevent disease.
The History of Vaccines
Contrary to popular belief, human beings began using vaccines for inoculation, not in 1796, (by Edward Jenner for cowpox) but much earlier. There is evidence that suggests that the practice, known as variolation, was being employed by the Chinese, Turkish, and African cultures as early as 1000CE. In the modern world, however, Edward Jenner is credited for using vaccines as a preventative measure against a specific disease.
The basic way of inoculation against any virus is to introduce dead or inactive bits of the virus to the body so it is able to later recognize and deal with the real thing when it comes along.
This bit of information is important when we come to the reasons why some people are against the idea of getting inoculated with vaccines.
This was closely followed by extensive research and innovation that allowed most of humanity to eradicate Polio, Cholera, and other pervasive infectious diseases down to almost negligible rates. Vaccines were developed to combat the black death aka the plague as well.
So if vaccines are so helpful that they were able to prevent millions of deaths and essentially save humanity from multiple possible pandemics in the past, then why is it that vaccine paranoia still exists?
Ancient Anti-Vaxxers
Unfortunately, the phenomenon of anti-vaxxers is not as recent as we would wish it to be. In fact, anti-vaccine sentiment has existed for as long as vaccines have existed. So let us go back to Edward Jennings and the cowpox vaccine in the late 1700s and the early 1800s. After proving that vaccination was an effective method for prevention, Edward was able to push for vaccines to be administered on a large-scale.
Essentially, he had used lymph from an infected animal and transferred it to a healthy person, allowing the second person to develop antibodies in their system. And this was the reason most people found problems with the vaccine. Some issues people pointed out were that the vaccine was unclean or (surprise, surprise.) unchristian because it came from an animal. Some individuals pointed out that they did not believe in Jennings’s theory on disease spread and doubted the efficacy of the vaccine (despite him proving this again and again).
It also became a political issue, with individuals pointing out that for vaccines to work it would require most if not all of the population to get immunized, and forced immunizations were a violation of their liberty (Is all this beginning to ring any bells?).
Writing in Anti-vaccinationists past and present, Wolfe, R.M., Sharpe, and L.K. state:
“The Vaccination Act of 1853 ordered mandatory vaccination for infants up to 3 months old, and the Act of 1867 extended this age requirement to 14 years, adding penalties for vaccine refusal. The laws were met with immediate resistance from citizens who demanded the right to control their bodies and those of their children. The Anti Vaccination League and the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League formed in response to the mandatory laws, and numerous anti-vaccination journals sprang up”
So it can clearly be seen that the anti-vax movement is moving along the same lines that it has since the earliest introduction of vaccination campaigns.
The same repeats in the modern-day US where mothers on Facebook groups spread rumors that DTP vaccines are harmful to health. This has been going on (though off of Facebook) since the 1970s and continues to this day.
Things are not that different towards the east either.
Pakistan is one of the last hold outs of Polio, a disease that is mostly preventable by vaccine and because of irrational fears that the vaccine is a zionist plot to prevent us from breeding (which has proven to be false, by the way). The issue here is that as much as we would like to blame the Mullahs alone, there have been multiple Rabbis and Christian priests that have stated that taking the vaccine will turn you, homosexual.
In Conclusion
The point can be made that the government does not have a right to inject one with something without their consent, but a counterpoint is that sometimes it might be prudent to prevent a certain segment of the population from spreading a fatal disease to the rest of us.
However authoritarian may it sound, it has to be admitted that the vaccine issue is not one of freedom and liberty but more of literacy and one’s fear of needles. And if you are afraid that vaccines will turn your child gay, then perhaps you must make the choice between them being homosexual and them being dead or disabled.
