Cries of ‘personal liberty’ recall prior epidemics.
‘Vaccine hesistancy’ isn’t new. Neither is the saving power of vaccines.
“I cwied,” reported my 2-year-old granddaughter. Translated into adult English, she was saying, “I cried,” and the cause of her tears was a visit to the doctor’s office the day before. There she had received the latest in an ongoing series of vaccinations. This one was for diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus, and it followed earlier shots to ward off hepatitis, influenza, measles, mumps, rubella, pneumonia and chickenpox.
My granddaughter’s tears were a small price to pay for the protection she’s received. The number of dread diseases that can be prevented by a simple stick in the arm or leg is little short of miraculous, and it’s more remarkable still how much those sticks have affected the human race. Vaccination has spared the world’s parents untold sorrow and pushed our lifespans to lengths our ancestors would have likened to Methuselah’s.
Sometime in the new year, most of us will likely be receiving another injection. This one promises to be a shot heard round the world. After months of excruciating losses — lost time, lost jobs, lost social lives, lost loved ones — the COVID-19 vaccines will, we trust, do nothing less than return the entire globe to its pre-pandemic normal. At this point, we’d settle for a ragged facsimile.
Although they were developed at “warp speed,” the new vaccines are the latest in an impressive line of medical breakthroughs. Long before scientists had unraveled the mysteries of the
human immune system, our ancestors realized that controlled exposure to a pathogen could fortify the body’s defenses against it. The idea that the hair of the dog could cure its bite, or at least keep that bite from getting infected, took a while to gain general acceptance, but results were convincing.
The Chinese were putting the principle into practice a thousand years ago, and Edward Jenner, a British physician, developed the Western world’s first vaccine in 1796. The target in both cases was smallpox, a disease that killed roughly a third of its victims and left many of its survivors disfigured for life. Smallpox caused hundreds of millions of deaths worldwide over the centuries, including what many scholars believe was a majority of the original inhabitants of North and South America.
The virus was still spreading when the first urban settlers reached Milwaukee in the 1830s. The city was plagued by smallpox epidemics for the rest of the century, and they were most severe in the immigrant wards — first German and then Polish — where crowded living conditions made contagion a way of life. Although a vaccine was widely available, not everyone took advantage, particularly when the Health Department tried to make it mandatory.
In an eerie foreshadowing of attitudes still current today, some citizens objected to the government’s intrusion on their “personal liberty,” even though science was on the vaccine’s side. “The cranks who oppose vaccination,” wrote Dr. Horace Brown in 1892, “belong to that class of incomprehensible blockheads who will not be convinced.” Another prominent physician lamented that “the grave has closed over many of the dupes of their insane councils.”
In “The Healthiest City,” her excellent history of public health reform in Milwaukee, Judith Walzer Leavitt notes that the heavy-handed tactics of Health Commissioner Walter Kempster only fanned the flames of resistance. In 1894 Kempster tried to forcibly remove a 2year-old Polish girl with smallpox to the city’s isolation hospital. The attempted abduction sparked a riot. Nearly 3,000 south siders, many of them immigrant mothers, chased health authorities out of their neighborhood, accelerating the epidemic and ultimately forcing Kempster’s dismissal.
By the time smallpox cases spiked again in 1925, resistance had evaporated. A total of 423,000 Milwaukeeans were vaccinated during the outbreak — more than 80% of the city’s population — and smallpox, here and elsewhere, was on the run. The disease was so completely eradicated that general vaccination ceased in 1972, leaving only baby boomers and our parents with those telltale vaccination scars on our upper arms.
Laboratory wizards picked off one disease after another in the 20th century, among them measles, yellow fever and whooping cough, but their batting average wasn’t 1.000. During the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic — the global scourge that most closely resembles our own — a vaccine was widely available. Shorewood health officials told the Milwaukee Sentinel that they had plenty on hand “for residents of that village who wish treatment,” and 30 Milwaukee police officers rolled up their sleeves for injections on Dec. 17. It turned out that the vaccine’s developers, shooting in the dark, had targeted bacteria, when the influenza was actually caused by a virus — a different pathogen entirely. The vaccine was useless.
Many of us older Milwaukeeans remember another experiment that was a history-making success. Polio had been crippling both children and adults for generations, and there was a fresh outbreak in the years just after World War II. The disease always peaked in summer, leading to periodic quarantines that confined kids under 12 to their homes and yards. Polio was a fixture of my childhood. My mother, apparently in a misdirected attempt to break me of a bad habit, warned that chewing ice cubes could cause polio. (It didn’t stop me.) My father once took us to see an iron lung, a mechanical device that did the breathing for paralyzed polio victims. The thought of being trapped in that claustrophobic torpedo tube was enough to give a kid nightmares.
The threat finally began to lift in 1955, when Jonas Salk’s vaccine, administered as a shot, was approved for general use. Albert Sabin’s version, taken orally, followed in 1961. I have foggy memories of being handed a little paper cup that held a vaccine-soaked sugar cube when I was a student at St. Mary’s
School in Hales Corners. (The sugar impressed me more than the vaccine.) By 1979, polio had virtually disappeared from the United States, and it was becoming a rarity in the rest of the world.
We all fervently hope for the same results from the COVID-19 vaccines being administered as you read these words. The prospect of putting this malignant nuisance in our rear-view mirrors is intoxicating. Is the day coming when we can actually hug each other, go out to eat, attend concerts, cheer our sports teams in person and socialize without fearing for our lives? Yes, we hope, but let’s remember and give thanks that this silver bullet is one more weapon in an arsenal that’s been under development for nearly two centuries.
A day after her latest vaccination, my granddaughter seemed proud that she had weathered the ordeal. She showed off the Band-Aid on her leg like a badge of courage and smiled that she had gotten “weal candy” after the shot — real in the form of gummy bears slipped to the nurse by her mother. I’m not expecting candy when my turn comes for the COVID-19 vaccine, but I hope it will lead to something even sweeter, and that is normalcy. It can’t come fast enough.
John Gurda writes a column on local history for the Ideas Lab on the first Sunday of every month. Email: mail@johngurda.com