Have we learned anything from anti-vaccine movements?
Our modern-day antivaxxers have a founding father.
In the early 1900s, Henning Jacobson was a fireand-brimstone minister in Cambridge, Mass. He built his flock by meeting immigrants as they stepped off the boat in Boston harbor. He became, by dint of force, a one-man social service agency for his fellow Swedes.
And he was, for all intents and purposes, the father of the modern antivax movement.
In 1901, a smallpox epidemic hit Boston, particularly the town’s immigrant population. Younger children were mostly spared; in 1855, Massachusetts started requiring children who attended public school to be vaccinated, and that quelled the spread.
As we push through what we hope is the end of a deadly pandemic, it’s confounding to ponder antivaxxers who insist on risking their health and the health of others because of a strange definition of “personal liberty.”
And that’s not just people who won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine, who are contributing to a disturbing, slowing vaccination rate. This past week, while the Connecticut State Senate debated a bill that eliminates the state’s religious exemption for mandatory school vaccinations (a bill Gov. Lamont signed into law on Wednesday), roughly 2,000 people stood outside the ornate Capitol and hoisted signs while chanting against– well, against science, I guess you could say.
Inside the building during a nine-hour debate on the bill, Sen. Tony Hwang (RFairfield), suggested lawmakers listen to the people outside. With all respect to Sen. Hwang, you can listen, and still not agree with a protester’s cause. And those protesters had multiple opportunities at marathon public hearings (this is the third year legislators had tried to pass this bill) to be heard.
Sometimes, despite impassioned pleas and deeplyheld beliefs, the answer is still no. There is the individual, and then there is the community and this pandemic has taught us, among other things, that our cultural definition of “community” is far from uniform.
And so it has always been. Public reaction to the early 1900s Northeast smallpox epidemic mirrors what we’ve seen with COVID-19. Older smallpox patients were moved to special hospitals, and free vaccination stations were set up around the city. Misinformation spread nearly as fast as the virus. There were also home-grown disaster capitalists anxious to make a fast buck off the horror. In those pre-FDA, pre-CDC days, public health officials warned that some scammers were offering vaccines that were not trustworthy.
Despite the lies and fake vaccines, by Dec. 1901, nearly a half-million Bostonians had been vaccinated, and medical personnel — anxious to close the gap and stop the spread — began going door to door to flush out the holdouts. People who refused the vaccine were fined $5 — or about $156 in today’s dollars.
As a child in Sweden, history says that Jacobson once had an intense reaction to a vaccine. When he was approached by Boston officials, he declined to get the smallpox vaccine, and he refused to pay the fine.
He was far from alone. Boston was home to the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League and more than a few doctors who believed a person’s right to choose medical care carried more weight than public health concerns.
Jacobson pressed his case, and Jacobson v. Massachusetts made it to the Supreme Court, which in 1905 decided that the state did in fact have the power to require vaccinations. In weighing the importance of public health (the right to staunch an epidemic by requiring vaccinations) and personal liberty (the right to risk catching whatever illness is floating around and perhaps spreading it to others), the court came down on the side of public health.
When Connecticut passed a compulsory school vaccination bill in 1959, legislators included a religious exemption. At the time, one representative argued against compulsory shots -- not because of religious freedom, but because, he said, “a mother has the right to say what sort of germ goes into the body of a child.”
Among the crowd outside Hartford’s Capitol building was at least one protester with a sign that said essentially the same thing: “This mom calls the shots.”
Devotion to a mother’s love is important, but when Gov. Lamont signed the bill into law, he said, “This legislation is needed to protect our kids against serious illnesses that have been well-controlled for many decades, such as measles, tuberculosis, and whooping cough, but have reemerged.”
Families can still seek medical exemptions and opponents of the law are free to challenge it in court. There’s every indication they will. Though the Supreme Court has weighed in on compulsory vaccinations, the justices have yet to issue a definitive rule on whether people who claim that vaccinations run counter to their religion have a valid legal argument.
We are still in a pandemic, and the coronavirus has killed 575,000 of us so far. It’s confounding that people are still balking at getting vaccinated – against childhood diseases, against the coronavirus. (The new law does not include the COVID vaccination.) But we can take heart that so far, vaccination programs eventually work. In 1980, the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated.
For what it’s worth, Pastor Jacobson’s old Massachusetts church now includes a flu vaccination station as part of their soup kitchen. Today’s church officials are polite, but a little tired of the press calling.