Was there any opposition to the polio or smallpox vaccines on a scale similar to modern opposition?

by SaintShrink
BedsideRounds

For polio, not that I'm aware of -- but for smallpox, absolutely! The most famous example is in England. Jenner, of course, was an English country doctor, and England had been a hot bed of variolation (that is, purposefully inoculating children with smallpox to prevent the disease) even before Jenner's discovery -- in fact, that was the context for Jenner's vaccination of James Phipps in the first place. From the beginning there were ethical quandaries on how to best use cowpox inoculation (aka vaccination, which until Pasteur's rabies vaccine ONLY referred to using cowpox to prevent smallpox). Other than the military (in which obedience was far easier to obtain), the first anti-vaccine movement sprung up in New Spain during the Balmis-Salvany expedition, which was a Spanish attempt to vaccinate their entire Empire (and probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives -- seriously, there's not a lot of scholarship in English, but you should really read about it!). But these appear to have been small scale protests, generally focused on the local government against mandatory vaccination.

The first organized anti-vaccine movement appropriately enough sprung up in the United Kingdom. Throughout the middle of the 19th century, Parliament passed increasingly stringent laws on mandatory vaccination for children -- the Vaccine Act of 1867 made it mandatory for all children through the age of 14 (it's important to remember that smallpox was largely considered a childhood disease -- which is really is in endemic areas, since all adults either immune or dead). Anti-vaccination leagues were formed with massive protests in cities across the UK. The authorities had little sympathy, and arrests and compulsory vaccinations were made. By the 1890s, though, the government had softened its tone and added a "conscience clause" to allow individuals to opt out.

There was a similar movement in the US, with rhetoric that should sound familiar in the 21st century: vaccination was “the greatest crime of the age,” it “slaughter[s] tens of thousands of innocent children,” and it “is more important than the slavery question, because it is debilitating the whole human race (source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449223/). However, when smallpox broke out in the town of Cambridge, MA, the public health department decreed compulsory vaccination for the town. Pastor Henning Jacobson, a Swedish immigrant, had been vaccinated in his native Sweden and had apparently suffered adverse effects. When Cambridge required mandatory vaccination, he was charged a $5 fine as per the law, and appealed the case of to the supreme court. I'm no expert in constitution law, but he lost Jacobson v Massachusetts set the precedent that police powers allowed for mandatory vaccination. This decision led to the formation of an American anti-vaccination league, and protests throughout the US of similar sizes.

Now I'm mostly using an American Medical Association "propaganda department" article to summarize their views, but the Anti-Vaccination League in the US had very similar arguments to anti-vaxxers today -- a focus on adverse effects (which there were in fact with vaccination; especially early on, cowpox inoculations could also inoculate bacteria, or viruses from other people like hepatitis), the deprivation of liberty, and a good about of pseudoscientific fearmongering (the AMA focuses on the fear of spreading syphilis, which would be EXCEEDINGLY unlike in vaccination).

Finally, anti-vaccination movements could occasionally turn violent, as they did in India during the 1950s and 60s, though this was a much different dynamic (involving traditional variolation treatments with a strong dose of the imperialist legacy).

I've been working on an episode for my podcast for a long time on the history of the anti-vaccination movement; I'm planning on finishing it later this year. But sufficed to say, antivaxxers are part of a long historical trend against compulsory vaccination -- and the ways that the public health community has dealt with the challenge in the past has some pertinent echoes for today.

Hope that answers your question!

EDIT: not really an edit, just want to make it clear -- I'm using "vaccination" in the pre-1871 defintiion, meaning cowpox inoculation to prevent smallpox.