Speaker 1: Hmm, that's behind the bastards. I'm Robert Evans. This is
Speaker 1: the show I do about bad people in the history
Speaker 1: behind them and the things you don't know about them. Uh.
Speaker 1: My guest for this episode is comics artist of Bad Comics.
Speaker 1: I pronounced it with an X. I hope you appreciate that,
Speaker 1: Anna Selena's how you doing, Anna, I'm good, Thanks for
Speaker 1: having me. How are you feeling today? Well, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm excited to learn about today's topic. Um, I am
Speaker 1: a little uh nervous because there are certain vaccines that
Speaker 1: I haven't gotten. I guess I'm tipping the hand a
Speaker 1: little bit, But I why amn't you've gotten them just
Speaker 1: because I don't get flu shots usually just because a laziness.
Speaker 1: Laziness not ideological. No, it's fine to endanger people out
Speaker 1: of laziness, right right. I'm just about to hear the
Speaker 1: magnitude by which I have endangered people. I think, Well, Uh,
Speaker 1: you're a fan of vaccines. Yeah, I'm I'm a general
Speaker 1: fan of Yeah. As someone who has never gotten like
Speaker 1: polio as amad, I'm a I'm a big ups on
Speaker 1: that stuff. Today we're going to be talking in detail
Speaker 1: about the anti vaccine movement. Uh. And when I first started,
Speaker 1: this was all going to be about the modern anti
Speaker 1: vax movement. We were going to talk about, you know,
Speaker 1: all the everything from Andrew Wakefield on. And as I
Speaker 1: started researching, I realized that it actually it goes back
Speaker 1: a lot further than that. Um, so this is going
Speaker 1: to be kind of a kind of a deep h
Speaker 1: I'm excited, alright. Alright, So right now as you and
Speaker 1: I talk, the Pacific Northwest is dealing with a measled outbreak.
Speaker 1: Fifty cases have been confirmed in an area around the
Speaker 1: city of Portland, Oregon, both in Oregon and Washington because
Speaker 1: kind of some of the suburbs of Portland, Oregon are
Speaker 1: actually parts of Washington, like Clark County. And that number
Speaker 1: kept creeping up as I was writing. This was like
Speaker 1: thirty five when I started on the episode, and it's
Speaker 1: fifty now and it will probably be you know, seven,
Speaker 1: need to one hundred by the time you the people
Speaker 1: listening to this right now in the future listen to it. Um. Portland,
Speaker 1: Oregon is a really good city to have a outbreak
Speaker 1: of a preventable disease like measles, because eight percent of
Speaker 1: the children in that city are unvaccinated, meaning the pool
Speaker 1: of infectable individuals is pretty high. Alongside New York and
Speaker 1: certain affluent parts of California, the city of Portland is
Speaker 1: a current stronghold of the anti vaccine movement. Oh, it's
Speaker 1: like if you swing hipster enough, you end up at
Speaker 1: And it's true for the far left and the far right.
Speaker 1: This is one thing where like if you're if you're
Speaker 1: like a fucking far left loony or you're like a fascist.
Speaker 1: Both of those groups have sizeable people who are like
Speaker 1: vaccines are a lie. Like you can get Alex Jones
Speaker 1: and fucking uh, what's his name? Ace Ventura. Jim Carroty
Speaker 1: on the same side of the vaccine trade is Jim Carrey. Also,
Speaker 1: he was kind of for a while because he was
Speaker 1: doating Jim McCarthy. Yeah, yeah, I'm not Actually, I'm actually
Speaker 1: not going to hit on her much in this episode,
Speaker 1: just because I don't know. I taught special lead for
Speaker 1: a while, and I feel for a parent who's like
Speaker 1: trying to grapple with something like that happening, I just
Speaker 1: don't want to. Like she's she's definitely done a lot
Speaker 1: of damage, but she's not the start of it. So
Speaker 1: there's bigger fish. There's bigger fish to fry. So let's
Speaker 1: let's get that pan out. Let's heat up some oil.
Speaker 1: I just made to lap last night. Oh man, bread
Speaker 1: it with like pank? What do you? What do you do?
Speaker 1: You bred it? Are you? Are you just frying it?
Speaker 1: I thought I was bredding it with parmesan to make
Speaker 1: a protein heavy and it did it work? Oh man?
Speaker 1: You know what I found that's really good is there's
Speaker 1: this this kind of low carb flour called carb Quick
Speaker 1: that has a shipload of protein in it. And you
Speaker 1: mix a bunch of shredded up cheese and that and
Speaker 1: then you fucking and you like crack an egg in that,
Speaker 1: and then you don't do that. It's so that's what
Speaker 1: That's what I'm doing next time. This is a podcast
Speaker 1: where we talk about various recipes for frying fish in
Speaker 1: order to make relate back to antivacxss it does it
Speaker 1: does apia specifically specifically, of the fish, they are the
Speaker 1: ones that resist vaccination the most. They do, and it's
Speaker 1: because they're very left wing, not right wing. Well, finn
Speaker 1: Finn is a wing. Yeah for the water. Anyway, let's
Speaker 1: let's move into here. Yeah, so it would be hard
Speaker 1: to consume media in the twenty one century and not
Speaker 1: run into stories about the anti vax movement and how
Speaker 1: it's been spurred on by the endorsement of celebrities. Uh,
Speaker 1: the anti vaccine movement seems like a new problem, something
Speaker 1: that could only be spread via the Internet's incredible ability
Speaker 1: to make lives go viral. But the sad, weird reality
Speaker 1: is that none of this is true. The anti vaccine
Speaker 1: movement does not have its origins in the twenty first
Speaker 1: century or the twentieth century. This ship has been going
Speaker 1: on for more than two hundred years. It's almost as
Speaker 1: old as the United States. So as long as there
Speaker 1: have been vaccines, there have been people being like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't believe it. Yeah, and in the case of
Speaker 1: the United States, slightly longer. Yeah, that's what we're about
Speaker 1: to get into. It's wild. So the story of vaccines,
Speaker 1: and this thus the story of the anti vax movement,
Speaker 1: starts with small box. Uh. Smallpox is a one of
Speaker 1: those diseases that's so bad we almost can't really like
Speaker 1: comprehend it, like a bolus scares people, but like it's
Speaker 1: kind of hard to spread ebola once you know, what
Speaker 1: it is like smallpox is super easy to spread um
Speaker 1: from like direct transmission to transmission, and it's incredibly deadly.
Speaker 1: Uh something like a third of people who get it die.
Speaker 1: Um at least back in the day, people who got
Speaker 1: it died. And the disease starts with a fever and
Speaker 1: then ends with like this full body eruption of scabs,
Speaker 1: Like you're just you're covered in scabs that leave behind
Speaker 1: like crater your face and body and permanent scars for
Speaker 1: the rest of your lives. So if you survive a
Speaker 1: full small pox outbreak, it looks like someone blasted off
Speaker 1: a bunch of bird shot into your face. Like you
Speaker 1: look like you've been hunting with Dick Cheney after getting
Speaker 1: this disease. It's just it's terrible And this is isn't
Speaker 1: like in warfare people would throw the smallpox blankets as
Speaker 1: a I mean, I don't think they would throw the blankets.
Speaker 1: There's certainly been some use of smallpox and other illnesses
Speaker 1: in warfare, like the Mongols would catapult like dead animals
Speaker 1: over the sides of walls and stuff with the plague,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, I don't know enough about I
Speaker 1: know that there's some controversy over whether or not smallpox
Speaker 1: blankets were like intentionally spread, but the mortality rate among
Speaker 1: Native Americans to smallpox was something um, so the majority, Like,
Speaker 1: it's very likely that most of the deaths that occurred
Speaker 1: of the hundred millionaires so people who died when the
Speaker 1: Europeans started coming to North and South America, that most
Speaker 1: of that was small box. Um, it just spread like wildfire.
Speaker 1: Oh god. Because smallpox is a disease that comes from
Speaker 1: the fact that we live around animals. You know. It's
Speaker 1: like related to cow pox, which is the thing that
Speaker 1: cows have that people can get, and that that's like
Speaker 1: that that's the big reason why. I'm sure a lot
Speaker 1: of people know this, but that's a big reason why
Speaker 1: the Native Americans got so fucked over by European diseases.
Speaker 1: They hadn't been living next to pigs and cows to
Speaker 1: the same extent Europeans, so we were just like Europeans
Speaker 1: are filthy. Oh my god. That's why I hate shows
Speaker 1: where people go back in time to like the Middle
Speaker 1: Ages and everything's fine. It's like, no, you would die
Speaker 1: of the diseases and everything would stink so hard, it
Speaker 1: would smell so bad. Yeah, I'm sorry, outlander, I don't
Speaker 1: believe your premise. No, And in fact, the only people
Speaker 1: that you could hang out around in that time period
Speaker 1: who wouldn't stink would have been the Native Americans because
Speaker 1: they were actually like pretty clean people and like lived
Speaker 1: pretty clean lives and weren't surrounded by poop all the time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's European cities in the Middle Ages and beyond. It's
Speaker 1: just a pile of poop and corpses. Uh, we're getting
Speaker 1: a little off topic here. So smallpox is terrible, um,
Speaker 1: and it lasts a long time. Imagine the worst flu
Speaker 1: you've ever had. It's like two weeks of flu followed
Speaker 1: by like three weeks of scab eruptions. It's like a
Speaker 1: month of being sick, and then you die, probably a
Speaker 1: lot of times you die. By the end of the
Speaker 1: eighteenth century, and estimated four thousand Europeans were dying every
Speaker 1: year from smallpox. So that's a lot of people. Uh.
Speaker 1: It killed like yeah, three and ten in but for
Speaker 1: children and the elderly the death rate was much higher.
Speaker 1: In London, most children would catch smallpox before their seventh birthday.
Speaker 1: If there was an outbreak in town. It was not
Speaker 1: uncommon for parents to avoid naming their babies just because like, well,
Speaker 1: we gotta make sure. Let's let's see if he lives
Speaker 1: through this smallpox thing, because nine out of ten fatal
Speaker 1: smallpox cases involved children under the age of five. The
Speaker 1: real baby killer here, like yeah, it's it wipes out
Speaker 1: some babies. Now, the good news is that smallpox was
Speaker 1: only spread by direct contact with a sufferer. At the time,
Speaker 1: smallpox scabs were believed to be a main vector for
Speaker 1: the disease, and it's possible for you to get smallpox
Speaker 1: from smallpox scabs, but modern science has revealed that the
Speaker 1: scabs are only really infectious when ground up, so it
Speaker 1: was really just direct contact that was spreading most of
Speaker 1: the time. So the good thing about smallpoxes that surprised
Speaker 1: surviving it conferred a lifelong immunity to the disease. So
Speaker 1: you get it once, you never get that ship again.
Speaker 1: It's like the chicken pox, like all the boxes. That's
Speaker 1: how boxes work. There you go. Starting in the tenth century,
Speaker 1: Chinese doctors would grind up smallpox scabs and have people
Speaker 1: snort them. This gave the patient a milder form of
Speaker 1: the disease that conferred to short boll I love motorcycles,
Speaker 1: but it almost was like tone music for what was happening. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So snort a bunch of smallpox scabs gives you a
Speaker 1: short term immunity. Um, but like still like four, three
Speaker 1: to five and a hundred would die from this treatment.
Speaker 1: So it was better than if there's a from the
Speaker 1: treatment itself. Yeah, So if there's smallpox spreading in your city,
Speaker 1: it's best to snort some scabs because you get a
Speaker 1: better chance of surviving that and you know you won't
Speaker 1: get as many scars and stuff, but like it's still
Speaker 1: really risky. Um. Now, in the twentieth century alone, smallpox
Speaker 1: killed and estimated three hundred million human beings, more than
Speaker 1: all of the centuries wars put together. So in the
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds, this was deadlier than World War One, World
Speaker 1: War two, Vietnam, Korea, all of those fucking wars thrown
Speaker 1: into a bucket small box killed more people. That's after
Speaker 1: we had a vaccine after Yeah, the disease was I
Speaker 1: think the last case was in the seventies and Somalia,
Speaker 1: So it has been effectively eradicated in the wild. It's incredible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it took you know a while to get that ship done. So.
Speaker 1: The road to eradicating smallpox started in seventeen ninety six
Speaker 1: when Edward Jenner, a genius, gave a presentation to the
Speaker 1: Royal Society of London. Jenner told them he'd inject the
Speaker 1: thirteen people with life infectious material from the scabs of
Speaker 1: people with cow pox, a disease related to smallpox. The
Speaker 1: cow pox gave its victims an immunity to smallpox, and
Speaker 1: so when exposed to smallpox later, these thirteen patients were unharmed.
Speaker 1: Jenner named his new invention the vaccine because vacca means
Speaker 1: cow in Latin. Yeah, it's cool, And he like, the
Speaker 1: only reason he knew this is because like, as a
Speaker 1: young man he was friends with like some milkmaids and
Speaker 1: they would have like scabs on their hands and be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you get that from cows, but I can't get smallpox.
Speaker 1: And he was like, what do you mean you can't
Speaker 1: get smallpox? And he's like, oh, yeah, you get this
Speaker 1: weird cow pox thing and you're fine. Ship, Wow, bring
Speaker 1: women into the process. Sooner was he friends with them
Speaker 1: or I don't I mean, I don't know, I don't
Speaker 1: know the detail, just sucking a lot of milkmaids. Then
Speaker 1: doesn't get smallpox himself, and it's like that he didn't either. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm just making that part of that was just a lie.
Speaker 1: Jenner was the first person to formally describe a develop
Speaker 1: a vaccine. His work sparked a massive medical renaissance and
Speaker 1: is in many ways the birth of modern Western medicine.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't be until the nineteen fifties when heat stable
Speaker 1: versions of the smallpox vaccine would finally be figured out,
Speaker 1: thus eliminating most of the negative side effects of the inoculation.
Speaker 1: Jenner's work was a huge step forward, but vaccination was
Speaker 1: still a very unpleasant process. Here's a quote from the
Speaker 1: book Pox and American History, which I really recommend. With
Speaker 1: a willing patient, the vaccine operation, as doctors called it,
Speaker 1: lasted just a minute or two. The doctor took hold
Speaker 1: of the patient's arms, scoring the skin with a needle
Speaker 1: or lancet. He then dabbed on the vaccine, either by
Speaker 1: taking a few droplets of liquid limph from a glass
Speaker 1: tube or using a small ivory point coated with dry vaccine.
Speaker 1: Either way, the vaccine contained live cow pox or vaccinia
Speaker 1: virus that not long before had oozed from a sore
Speaker 1: on the underside of an infected calf in a health
Speaker 1: department stable In the coming days, the virus would produce
Speaker 1: a sistr like vesicle on the vaccination side. In due course,
Speaker 1: the lesion would heal, leaving a permanent scar the distinctive
Speaker 1: vaccination psychatrics. If all went well, the patient would then
Speaker 1: enjoy immunity from smallpox for five to seven years, sometimes longer.
Speaker 1: So when you're immune, you can't pass on the disease,
Speaker 1: you can't get it. You get a scar on your arm,
Speaker 1: and you get sick, like some people are sick for
Speaker 1: a week or two, like get a really bad flu
Speaker 1: like it. It can take you out of commission for
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks. So it's way better than getting smallpox,
Speaker 1: but it's still really sucks, and that's important for what
Speaker 1: comes next. So, because the societal cost of smallpox epidemics
Speaker 1: was so high, governments around the world were quick to
Speaker 1: embrace the new treatment. Many of the people in those countries, however,
Speaker 1: were less than enthused about the idea of having pieces
Speaker 1: of an infected caps or pushed under their arm, Like
Speaker 1: it's gross. Yeah, yeah, somebody's taking like a scab from
Speaker 1: a cow's right, and up until this point, I feel
Speaker 1: like medicine has been pretty wonky, like with letting blood
Speaker 1: and drinking mercury humors. So it's like, I can see
Speaker 1: how that distrust continues. Yeah, it's not like today where
Speaker 1: doctors make miracles happen every day. It was like, well
Speaker 1: this guy, Also, what's the guy told my uncle to
Speaker 1: drink all that mercury and then my uncle died from
Speaker 1: drinking all that mercury. I don't want to trust him
Speaker 1: more exactly. Not that Edward Jenner was a big mercury fan,
Speaker 1: but like doctors in general, Like, right, the change I think,
Speaker 1: and I'm really basing this off of the show Outlander,
Speaker 1: but the change between people's understanding of science and medicine
Speaker 1: seemed to be pretty this is when it was just starting. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And so doctors are still like, it's not exactly a
Speaker 1: highly thought of profession by many people, because so much
Speaker 1: of medicine was bullshit at this point exactly, So that's
Speaker 1: important to uh. The anti vaccine movement actually reached American
Speaker 1: shores before vaccination did. In two years before Harvard doctor
Speaker 1: performed the first US vaccinations A group of doctors and
Speaker 1: priests in Boston created the first anti vaccination society. They
Speaker 1: stated that vaccination was quote defiance to heaven itself, even
Speaker 1: to the will of God. Yeah, it's fun stuff. So
Speaker 1: two years before there's even vaccinations, there's people being like,
Speaker 1: this is the devil. There's simply because you are putting
Speaker 1: the disease into you. And they're like, there's no way.
Speaker 1: I think for the for those people, because it was
Speaker 1: like a religious thing, they were like, well, God wants
Speaker 1: you to get sick or not right, and if you're
Speaker 1: this is trying to like thwart the will of the
Speaker 1: Lord h And I wonder too if it has to
Speaker 1: do with power, like the people going out and saying
Speaker 1: I can protect you, like the people with the church,
Speaker 1: or older doctors saying this is how you're protected. If
Speaker 1: someone else comes with an answer, yeah, because at that
Speaker 1: point a lot of priests would have been like the
Speaker 1: only way to protect yourself is to like get right
Speaker 1: with God. And then some doctors like, well, no, we've
Speaker 1: got this thing, and you're like, oh, we don't want
Speaker 1: that going on here. Not in seven seen ninety eight, motherfucker.
Speaker 1: It still doesn't feel that late. Yeah, you know it's
Speaker 1: it's really not. Thomas Jefferson was the us is first
Speaker 1: major vaccine advocate. Like he was the like during his presence,
Speaker 1: he was like, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta get
Speaker 1: on this ship. This is really working over in England,
Speaker 1: um in eighteen o nine, smallpox vaccination was made mandatory
Speaker 1: in Massachusetts. West Virginia followed soon after. In eighteen forty,
Speaker 1: the British Parliament passed the Vaccination Act, which made it
Speaker 1: illegal and punishable by fines for a parent to fail
Speaker 1: to vaccinate their child. As vaccines spread through the West,
Speaker 1: doctors started noticing something interesting. The smallpox virus appeared to
Speaker 1: be dying out. They discovered something called herd immunity. When
Speaker 1: a virus has nowhere to go because so many people
Speaker 1: are immune, it eventually goes extinct, first in areas and
Speaker 1: then perhaps worldwide. But the path to eradicating smallpox would
Speaker 1: not be so simple, and cities like Stockholm in London concerned.
Speaker 1: Parents began spreading rumors of the harms of vaccines and
Speaker 1: complaining about the fines levied on them if they failed
Speaker 1: to vaccinate their kids. Discover magazine had a great rite
Speaker 1: up on this and they described these early anti vaxers
Speaker 1: is mostly quote middle class citizens who didn't trust government,
Speaker 1: science or medicine. Oh no, too close to home. Yeah,
Speaker 1: nothing ever changes. I mean that's like this, what are
Speaker 1: you doing? Well, Yeah, it's it's it's those those tricky Swedes,
Speaker 1: you know. Every time. I want to root for him
Speaker 1: because I love their sandwiches. I love just a pile
Speaker 1: of bread with like white sauce and a just a
Speaker 1: pile of tiny shrimp on it. The best sandwiches, that's
Speaker 1: what it is. I can't even pronounce that. Ship. Yeah. Look,
Speaker 1: I'll follow Sweden Twitter account until I die because it's
Speaker 1: just the most delightful. But god damnit, Stockholm. I've had
Speaker 1: one breakfast in Stockholm. One breakfast in Stockholm, and it
Speaker 1: was like an actual restaurant and it was like told
Speaker 1: to me, it's like a traditional Swedish like like breakfast buffet,
Speaker 1: and it had all the beer I could drink at
Speaker 1: eight in the morning. So I'm I love this. I
Speaker 1: love Stockholm. But they were wrong about party Viking stock
Speaker 1: So for a while the anti vaccine stuff was just talked.
Speaker 1: But the rapid expansion of the global post in the
Speaker 1: late eighteen hundreds, and the increased affordability of printing pamphlets
Speaker 1: and magazines at the same time led to an explosion
Speaker 1: of anti vaccine literature. Going to quote now from the
Speaker 1: British Medical Journal, this is about like the anti vaccine
Speaker 1: journals quote. The journals included the Anti Vaccinator founded eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine, the National Anti Compulsory Vaccination Reporter eighteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: and the Vaccination Inquirer eighteen seventy nine. Similar movements flourished
Speaker 1: elsewhere in Europe and Stockholm, the majority of the population
Speaker 1: began to refuse vaccination, so that by eighteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: vaccination rates in Stockholm had fallen to just over whereas
Speaker 1: they approached nine and the rest of Sweden. Fearing a
Speaker 1: serious epidemic, the chief city physician demanded stricter measures. A
Speaker 1: major epidemic in eighteen seventy four shocked the city and
Speaker 1: led to widespread vaccination in an end to further epidemics.
Speaker 1: So the Swedes did get the picture after like two epidemics,
Speaker 1: Like maybe maybe anti vaccinations both ship. Yeah, when everyone
Speaker 1: around you starts dying all this makes me think of
Speaker 1: as my great grandma in Sweden who was so religious
Speaker 1: just so for con pro church. I'm like, okay, I
Speaker 1: getting Swedes have their bad side too, you know they do? Yeah,
Speaker 1: they do? Uh now um, Great Britain did not get
Speaker 1: the message in such a timely manner. The city of Leicester,
Speaker 1: for some reason, became the nexus of an anti of
Speaker 1: anti vaccine resistance. Groups of furious parents would gather in
Speaker 1: March and show off signs. In five hundred thousand anti
Speaker 1: vaccine advocates marched in Leicester. They hanged Dr Edward Jenner
Speaker 1: and Effigy for the crime of inventing the smallpox. This
Speaker 1: prompted the government to create a Royal Commission to investigate
Speaker 1: the claims of the anti vaccine advocates and read evidence
Speaker 1: on vaccines and their possible downsides. It released its report
Speaker 1: in eighteen ninety six and concluded that vaccines worked and
Speaker 1: said it also advocated ending government penalties for people who
Speaker 1: refused vaccination, a new conscience clause, and the Vaccine Act
Speaker 1: of eight allowed parents to receive a certificate of exemption.
Speaker 1: This is actually the first time the phrase conscientious objector
Speaker 1: was entered into English. That's while that's where it comes from.
Speaker 1: That it's first of all so parallel to the penalties
Speaker 1: if you didn't have healthcare with Obamacare, which just suck
Speaker 1: it up. Let's just give yeah, the Western world that
Speaker 1: that's where conscientious observer comes from. Objector objector. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: within a decade, conscientious objectors accounted for one quarter of
Speaker 1: all births in England. So it immediately gets out of hand. Uh.
Speaker 1: Spurred on by this minor victory, the British anti vax
Speaker 1: movement surged forward. I found an exerpt from one of
Speaker 1: their magazines published right after this point. The goal seems
Speaker 1: to be to herald their first major victory over the
Speaker 1: evils of vaccines. I'm gonna hand this up a little
Speaker 1: bit for you. I might try to do an act
Speaker 1: sent We'll see if that's that's a good idea. We'll
Speaker 1: know pretty quickly. Well, I hope a mighty and horrible
Speaker 1: monster with the horns of a bull, the hind of
Speaker 1: a horse, the jaws of a kraken, the teeth and
Speaker 1: claws of a tiger, the tail of a cow, and
Speaker 1: all the evils of Pandora's box in his belly, plague, pestilence, leprosy,
Speaker 1: purple blotches, fetid ulcers in filthy, running sores covering his body,
Speaker 1: and an atmosphere of accumulated disease, pain, and death around him,
Speaker 1: has made his appearance in the world and devours mankind,
Speaker 1: especially poor helpless infants. Not by sores only, or hundreds
Speaker 1: or thousands, but by hundreds of thousands. This monster has
Speaker 1: been named vaccination, and his progressive havoc among the human
Speaker 1: race has been dreadful and most alarming, Yet strange to tell,
Speaker 1: this monster has found not only a multitude of friends,
Speaker 1: but worshippers who prostrate themselves before him and encourage his
Speaker 1: voracious appetite. Do not the men, the heroes who first
Speaker 1: dared to stand forth to arrest the progress and stop
Speaker 1: the fatal havoc of this most dreadful and destructive monster
Speaker 1: and it lengths, have bravely subdued and put him to
Speaker 1: flight with all his mighty host Meriton obelisk created to
Speaker 1: their fame, with their names inscribed upon it, in indelible
Speaker 1: characters to be held in grateful remembrance through all future generations.
Speaker 1: Do they know they're describing smallpox the disease? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: what do they think? Smallpoxes not as bad as getting
Speaker 1: vaccinated for small box. It's what they're doing is describing
Speaker 1: it like a Satanist cult, like vaccinations. And I think
Speaker 1: some of it comes from just the assumption that, well,
Speaker 1: I won't get small box when it comes through town
Speaker 1: because I'm special, because yeah, but if I if I
Speaker 1: get the vaccine, I'll get kind of sick. Yeah. So yeah,
Speaker 1: and so it's worse than I mean, that's so similar.
Speaker 1: There's some art that accompanies this passage. You know, that
Speaker 1: monster with the tail of a cow and the closet
Speaker 1: teeth of the type they drew it. I gotta I'll
Speaker 1: describe it a thank you, thank you. So it's a
Speaker 1: what I assume as a cow, an alligator mouth and
Speaker 1: lots of tiny colligator and then people trying to get
Speaker 1: into Oh no, they're it's got nipples or I'm not
Speaker 1: sure if those are nipples or so. I think there's
Speaker 1: sores because they're they're like bleeding pus and he's so
Speaker 1: people are I see what it is? Now doctors would
Speaker 1: I assume our doctors pro vax ers with horns are
Speaker 1: pouring babies, tiny babies into its mouth, and then it's
Speaker 1: shifting them out. The cow creature is shifting out alligators
Speaker 1: alligator is shifting out the babies. Yeah, it's pretty great.
Speaker 1: That's a good logo. Yeah, we'll have this up on
Speaker 1: the side behind the Bastards dot com. And since we
Speaker 1: just had a colligator shipping dead babies, I think the
Speaker 1: only appropriate thing to do is an ad bread. We're
Speaker 1: back by. Those products really took the taste of that
Speaker 1: sore filled colligator out of my mouth. Now it's back
Speaker 1: in my mouth. Now it's back in your mouth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's just right there at that thing. I
Speaker 1: just pretty cool, pretty cool drawing. I kind of love it,
Speaker 1: but not for its purpose. Not for its purpose, but
Speaker 1: you've got to appreciate a good, good, real horrifying. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Political cartoon. Now back in the United States. Despite its
Speaker 1: early head start, the anti vaccine movement was not a
Speaker 1: significant force from most of the eighteen hundreds. After vaccinations
Speaker 1: introduction at the start of the century, the smallpox virus
Speaker 1: was almost eradicated in America by the eighteen twenties or so,
Speaker 1: but it came roaring back in the eighteen seventies because
Speaker 1: so many people stopped vaccinating themselves. Since the gender vaccine
Speaker 1: was only good for five to seven years, regular vaccinations
Speaker 1: were required in order to maintain a city's herd immunity.
Speaker 1: And this is where things get a little muddier in
Speaker 1: terms of blame, because the earliest American vaccine refusers kind
Speaker 1: of had a point. Vaccination was undoubtedly worth it on
Speaker 1: a societal level, but it caused significant human suffering. Taking
Speaker 1: the gender vaccine still made you sick, and some people
Speaker 1: died from it. Um It was not nearly as bad
Speaker 1: as smallpox, but many, particularly white Americans, did not believe
Speaker 1: they needed to suffer through that, since by the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds, smallpox was widely considered to be a disease
Speaker 1: suffered from and spread by black people. One of its
Speaker 1: many nicknames was the inWORD itch. Now, yeah, it's we're
Speaker 1: I mean, we're talking about America in the eighteen seventies.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be diving into some hardcore racism, some like
Speaker 1: some like racism that David Duke would look at and
Speaker 1: be like, guys, too far and that's far, that's far. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: when smallpox outbreaks would hit cities, large numbers of particularly
Speaker 1: affluent Americans would often refuse vaccination. Families would also hide
Speaker 1: their sick family members rather than turning them over to
Speaker 1: pox houses, where they'd basically sit in a prison for
Speaker 1: weeks and either recover or die. That's what happened when
Speaker 1: you caught small box, and especially if you were poor.
Speaker 1: Black families were particularly likely to hide their ilkin because
Speaker 1: of course the pox houses for black people were always
Speaker 1: poorly maintained and terrifying. Sick prisons, definitely, and you would
Speaker 1: almost definitely die. Yeah. Early anti vaccine sentiment then was
Speaker 1: not so much a rejection of vaccines as it was
Speaker 1: a fear of getting sick mixed with racism and an
Speaker 1: understandable fear of racism. But in short order, an understandable
Speaker 1: impulse morphed into an ideology familiar to anyone who's listened
Speaker 1: to Jenny McCarthy lately Here's Discover magazine. In eighteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: after a visit to New York by William Tebb, the
Speaker 1: leading British anti vaccinationist, the Anti Vaccination Society of America
Speaker 1: was founded. Subsequently, the New England Anti Compulsory Vaccination League
Speaker 1: was formed in eighteen eighty two, and the Anti Vaccine
Speaker 1: League of New York City in eighteen eighty five. Using pamphlets,
Speaker 1: court battles and vigorous fights on the floor of state legislatures.
Speaker 1: The anti vaccinationists succeeded in repealing compulsory vaccination laws in California, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Utah,
Speaker 1: West Virginia, and Wisconsin. A continual battle was waged between
Speaker 1: public health authorities and the anti vaccinationists, with the anti
Speaker 1: vaccinationist battling vaccination in the courts and instigating riots. In
Speaker 1: Montreal and Milwaukee. There was also a riot and rio
Speaker 1: de jan era. They were like riots over vaccinations. People
Speaker 1: like shot at each other over vaccinations. That's crazy, fighting
Speaker 1: in the streets over vaccination, over vaccinations. Now this might
Speaker 1: make a little bit more sense in a little while.
Speaker 1: Um being Americans, the anti vactor has also made political cartoons.
Speaker 1: Ours were not as subtle or as artistic as the
Speaker 1: European ones. You want to describe that. Yeah, so we've
Speaker 1: got a snake labeled vaccination just written right on the
Speaker 1: side in big words, this is a badal. It's hissing
Speaker 1: at a mother and her infant child. And then behind
Speaker 1: the snake is a skeleton in all which I must
Speaker 1: assume is death. And then over top it says do
Speaker 1: not vaccinate. Now, what do you think the message of
Speaker 1: that cartoon is I really think that it's about the economy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what I'm getting. I think it's it's about the economy,
Speaker 1: the quality, collapse of the banking system in what I read.
Speaker 1: That's what That's what I read from it to a
Speaker 1: lot of subtleties and that giant snake with vaccination. Sorry,
Speaker 1: that's a bad cartoon. That's not an effective cartoon. Whoever
Speaker 1: drew that shouldn't be making them. Also, the mom has
Speaker 1: a really shitty face, a really shitty face. Yea, yeah,
Speaker 1: the baby looks weird. Baby looks weird. Fan of the skeleton.
Speaker 1: I'm a fan of the skeleton. That's the best part.
Speaker 1: I would love to see the world where it's just
Speaker 1: skeletons and veils and I love I want to imagine
Speaker 1: the editor talking to this cartoonist being like, no, the
Speaker 1: snake with vaccination written on the side isn't clear enough. Skeleton. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we need a skeleton up in there. I'm still not
Speaker 1: getting it. Just put a label at the very top
Speaker 1: with two exclamation point just to all caps. All caps.
Speaker 1: By the turn of the century, the federal organization in
Speaker 1: charge of stopping the spread of smallpox in America was
Speaker 1: the United States Marine Hospital Service. This was a quasi
Speaker 1: military organization, and it needed to be. Resistance to vaccination
Speaker 1: in American cities was often violent. Starting in the late
Speaker 1: eighteen nineties, a new strain of smallpox began racing through
Speaker 1: communities in the American South. It was milder and less deadly,
Speaker 1: which sounds like a good thing, but it was not
Speaker 1: necessarily a good thing. Diseases that mutate into less deadly
Speaker 1: versions can just as easily mutate into something more lethal,
Speaker 1: so it's still just as important to eradicate infestations when
Speaker 1: they start. However, the fact that the new smallpox killed
Speaker 1: fewer people acted as fuel for the anti vaccine movement.
Speaker 1: This smallpox barely kills anyone, why should we vaccinated our
Speaker 1: kids against it? Uh So? The fact that this new
Speaker 1: strand smallpox had a reputation for infecting quote none but
Speaker 1: negroes also had another major impact. Oh god, yeah, I
Speaker 1: can totally see how it goes. So rather than being
Speaker 1: wiped out when it started to spread, this new smallpox
Speaker 1: virus burnt through the Southeast like a Texas wildfire. Here's
Speaker 1: the book Pox cuban Itch. Some called it or Puerto
Speaker 1: Rico scratch, Manila scab, Filipino itch, Mexican bump inWORD itch,
Speaker 1: Italian itch, Hungarian itch, camp itch, army itch, elephant itch,
Speaker 1: kangaroo itch, cedar itch, bean pox, or simply bumps. Really
Speaker 1: curious about why kangaroos came into it. Was it about
Speaker 1: Australia like the outlaws in Australia, it was still the
Speaker 1: Australians are bringing in the small box. Maybe maybe it
Speaker 1: was directed at Indigenous people in Australia after all of
Speaker 1: the racism and the preceding two thirds of that. The
Speaker 1: idea that they might have just hated Australians is almost
Speaker 1: like almost wholesome. It is almost kangaroo, which might I
Speaker 1: feel like someone's going to call us out on on
Speaker 1: that and be like no, no, no, no. Kangaroo was
Speaker 1: a racial slur for the Portuguese O God was it
Speaker 1: affecting like Cuba and Puerto Rico. I mean it affected everywhere.
Speaker 1: It spread through the world like wildfire. One of the
Speaker 1: reasons why there was this myth that black people were
Speaker 1: more likely to get it is that particularly black minstrel
Speaker 1: shows traveled a lot throughout this area, and so these
Speaker 1: people would be traveling, and people who travel a lot
Speaker 1: are more likely to spread diseases and stuff, So that
Speaker 1: was like one reason, but it was also like a
Speaker 1: lot of it was just racism, Like they would just say, well,
Speaker 1: it must have been a black guy who brought that
Speaker 1: is east to town just because they were racist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like how immigrants bring crime. Ya, that's what they do.
Speaker 1: That's what they do. That's my parents came here and
Speaker 1: said it's time to rob And you know, only our
Speaker 1: doctors are immigrants. And I feel like, as a country,
Speaker 1: if there's one thing we can lose, it's a quarter
Speaker 1: of our doctors. Oh yeah, we're doing We're healthy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're fine, we're fine, we're doing great. I do listen
Speaker 1: to that, and I'm like, oh, my desire to not
Speaker 1: get a flu shot is not too far off from
Speaker 1: them being like it's just baby smallpox, just baby smallpox. No,
Speaker 1: I mean we all like, that's you can see why
Speaker 1: it spreads like these are all you know. I don't
Speaker 1: get the flu shot as often as I ought to,
Speaker 1: so I'm like, I won't get I trust that my
Speaker 1: eating expired muscles and clams on a regular basis will
Speaker 1: keep me safe from everything. Yeah, so far it has.
Speaker 1: I have had I'm one of the only people you
Speaker 1: probably meet who's had a polio in a smallpox vaccination. Oh,
Speaker 1: because I've traveled in some places where it's like you,
Speaker 1: you might want to get a polio vaccination has been
Speaker 1: going down here, and the smallpox vaccination does suck. Did
Speaker 1: you get the flu? No? No, but like your arm
Speaker 1: is fucked up for a while, how long, I don't know,
Speaker 1: like four or five days. Like it just sucks. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: since every white person in America was racist as funk
Speaker 1: back then, and since smallpox was seen as a disease
Speaker 1: spread by non white people, the most Southern communities responded
Speaker 1: to outbreaks by restricting the mobility of their black citizens
Speaker 1: even more often quarantining the black parts of town when
Speaker 1: an outbreak started. This, of course, led to black people
Speaker 1: hiding their sick family members from vaccination corps doctors. Racism
Speaker 1: also meant that many communities failed to take the outbreak seriously.
Speaker 1: In even when smallpox began raging in the black neighborhood
Speaker 1: of Middlesboro, Kentucky, white people basically ignored the problem. At first.
Speaker 1: The local newspaper wrote quote up to the present, no
Speaker 1: white people have been attacked, and there is positively no
Speaker 1: occasion for alarm. There was thousand something like people got
Speaker 1: it there. It was a terrible, terrible outbreak. Unlike everyone
Speaker 1: else back then, smallpox was not racist, and it quickly
Speaker 1: spread through both black and white homes. So very woke illness.
Speaker 1: That's a good lineoox, Yeah, very good line. The Marine
Speaker 1: Hospital Service sent over doctors to contain the outbreak, since
Speaker 1: local authorities had failed horribly. The city was, quote from
Speaker 1: the book Pox, divided into five districts, one inspector to
Speaker 1: each make a house to house canvas. A local newspaper
Speaker 1: boasted awkwardly that the services inspection showed that quote, outside
Speaker 1: of smallpox, this is the healthiest town on the globe.
Speaker 1: What they examined. Everyone vaccinating the few unscarred people they found.
Speaker 1: Anyone who refused the vaccination order was promptly turned over
Speaker 1: to the city authorities, who gave the violator the option
Speaker 1: of being vaccinated or taken to jail. This was quote
Speaker 1: something of a moot question, because if the uncooperating person
Speaker 1: shows jail, they are vaccinated as soon as they enter
Speaker 1: under a law requiring all inmates of jails to be vaccinated.
Speaker 1: My god, I kind of love that. Yeah, it's pretty great.
Speaker 1: Many who resisted were simply handcuffed and vaccinated, literally at gunpoint.
Speaker 1: Police would show up. No, you're got You're gonna get
Speaker 1: the fucking shot right now. Which do you When infected
Speaker 1: people were found in a home, all clothing and betting
Speaker 1: was burnt, the house would be pumped full of sulfur
Speaker 1: smoke in order to sterilize it. If the home was
Speaker 1: too old and drafty to be effectively sterilized this way,
Speaker 1: the vaccination core would just burn it down. Well, it
Speaker 1: was like a part of this, we just gotta burn
Speaker 1: down this whole block. Suck it. I understand a how
Speaker 1: that was effective, but also be how that made people
Speaker 1: be like, it's not like today where someone's just reading
Speaker 1: nonsense on the internet and decide not to vaccinate their kids.
Speaker 1: It's like, you see these people showing up at your
Speaker 1: door with guns and cutting your arm and burning down houses,
Speaker 1: and you don't like them. It's like down houses a lot.
Speaker 1: I get why you might not trust these people. It's
Speaker 1: not unreasonable. Yeah, I think the people burning down the
Speaker 1: house in this case are overall in the right. I
Speaker 1: get I get the resistance a team. McCormick was a
Speaker 1: member of the Kentucky Board of Health. The Middlesborough outbreak
Speaker 1: was a major black mark on his organization's name because
Speaker 1: they basically ignored shit when it started and then failed
Speaker 1: to provide adequate resources to fight the epidemic. In order
Speaker 1: to say face, McCormick blamed black people, announcing that quote
Speaker 1: the exemption of the white race from this mild strain
Speaker 1: of smallpox was over and quote visiting and strange negro
Speaker 1: should be hunted, vaccinated, and kept under observation. Again, not
Speaker 1: all good guys on this side. So uh. During outbreaks,
Speaker 1: local governments would force community members to provide proof of vaccination.
Speaker 1: Failure to do so could result in fines, usually between
Speaker 1: five and a hundred dollars. Short jail terms were also common,
Speaker 1: but local judges would also force people to work on
Speaker 1: chain gangs. In one instance in North Carolina, a vaccine
Speaker 1: refuser who threatened to spread smallpox to his political enemies
Speaker 1: had quote three buggy whips worn out on him, so
Speaker 1: they were within people. Sometimes for this everything is hardcore.
Speaker 1: In the late eighteen hundreds, nobody half asses anything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is weird too. Because it's also the era of
Speaker 1: like female propriety and like like just being proper in general,
Speaker 1: and that Victorian sensibility. What side of so the is
Speaker 1: also the area in which the feminist movement is very
Speaker 1: first starting to come in. Which side of this do
Speaker 1: you think they wind up on? Oh? God, okay, they were?
Speaker 1: Well no, Actually, that's part of what makes this fun.
Speaker 1: I mean, some of them were, but that's part of
Speaker 1: what we're getting to that so well, vaccination was a
Speaker 1: clear good and a necessary thing. Many of its major
Speaker 1: advocates were bastards. And this is where the story gets
Speaker 1: kind of weird because a lot of the first American
Speaker 1: anti vaccine advocates were not idiots and kuks. Many of
Speaker 1: them were progressives who supported women's suffrage in anti racist policies,
Speaker 1: and we're reacting to the racism that was often present
Speaker 1: in vaccination campaigns. While the first anti vax movement in
Speaker 1: England was a working class thing, the American anti vax
Speaker 1: movement was an affluent left wing movement. So basically, right
Speaker 1: wing authoritarian assholes like the governments in small town southern
Speaker 1: America were pro vaccine but also used the threat of
Speaker 1: smallpox to further repressed black people and generally went about
Speaker 1: ensuring vaccine laws were complied with in the most brutal
Speaker 1: way possible. Meanwhile, a lot of leftists were anti vaccine,
Speaker 1: which was insanely dangerous, But they were also reacting to
Speaker 1: a lot of the big getry that was wrapped up
Speaker 1: in the whole thing. It's fucking why, very complicated, it really.
Speaker 1: Frederick Douglas, the famed abolitionist, stood against compulsory vaccination. You
Speaker 1: believe that mandatory vaccines were an encroachment on people's freedom
Speaker 1: of choice because they were like whipping, whipping people in
Speaker 1: burning houses. Yeah, you can see why someone would be
Speaker 1: on the other side of that. Leo Tolstoy was an
Speaker 1: anti vaccine sympathizer, agreeing with the cause for the same
Speaker 1: reason he agreed with quote every struggle for liberty in
Speaker 1: any sphere of life. These were not always high minded
Speaker 1: arguments about freedom. George Bernard Shaw called vaccination a peculiarly
Speaker 1: filthy piece of witchcraft. If you're a fan of a
Speaker 1: great author or poet or civil rights leader from the
Speaker 1: late eighteen hundreds or early nineteen hundreds, there's a weirdly
Speaker 1: good chance they were anti vaccine. Advocates. The book Pox
Speaker 1: says that these people were part of a now mostly
Speaker 1: defunct American intellectual tradition called libertarian radicalism. These folks aren't
Speaker 1: libertarians in the sense that we're used to. Most of
Speaker 1: what they advocated had nothing to do with economics. You know,
Speaker 1: iron Ran hadn't been born yet. They were more focused
Speaker 1: on personal freedom, which made them great on issues like
Speaker 1: letting women vote and arguing that black people shouldn't be
Speaker 1: murdered by cops, but made them bad on vaccination. Quote
Speaker 1: from the book Box, the same men and women who
Speaker 1: joined anti vaccination leagues tended to throw themselves into other
Speaker 1: maligned causes of their era, including anti imperialism, women's rights,
Speaker 1: anti vivisection, vegetarianism, Henry Georgie's single tax, the fight against
Speaker 1: government censorship of obscene materials under the late nineteenth century
Speaker 1: comstock laws, and opposition to state eugenics. Interesting. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: really complicated. Well, it's I mean, I get it because
Speaker 1: the way it was compulsory vaccination was enforced was problematic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: problematic even when it's like necessary, when it's like no,
Speaker 1: thousands of people will die if we're not burning down
Speaker 1: houses like forcing, and you know people's houses who got
Speaker 1: burned down. Rich people didn't get their houses burned down.
Speaker 1: Rich people didn't get forced at gunpoint probably. Uh. And
Speaker 1: there were some doctors shot doing this too, Like it
Speaker 1: was hard for ship. Like you could do a pretty
Speaker 1: good like Showtime original series about like being a hard
Speaker 1: boiled vaccine doctor. I don't know, but I think Woody
Speaker 1: Harrelson would be a great two fisted vaccine doctor, very
Speaker 1: good cutting fucking razor blade in one hand, cutting people's
Speaker 1: arms and shooting others. It's great. Well, okay, if anyone's listening.
Speaker 1: If anyone's listening, that's a hot ticket. I'll write your scripts.
Speaker 1: I don't know how to write scripts, but but you
Speaker 1: can definitely consult. I'll draw a crude picture of Woody
Speaker 1: Harrelson being a badass vaccine doctor. It'll be great, and
Speaker 1: it'll have similarities to the cow. It'll it's gonna look
Speaker 1: a lot like the Calligator. Yeah, yeah, yeah, uh so. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is not the story that I expected. I didn't
Speaker 1: wind up telling when I first started researching the anti
Speaker 1: vaccine movement. Part of this story is that yes, we
Speaker 1: are still very dumb and refused to use life saving
Speaker 1: medicine for dumb reasons. But it's just more complicated than that.
Speaker 1: The fact that being anti vax was more reasonable in
Speaker 1: the late eight hundreds in early nineteen hundreds meant that
Speaker 1: it was also more popular. Like I said, there were
Speaker 1: enormous anti vaccine riots and cities around North and South
Speaker 1: America then as today. Parents who suffered tragic losses or
Speaker 1: health issues with their kids formed a crucial core of
Speaker 1: the movement. In six Laura Little of Minneapolis lost her
Speaker 1: seven year old son. She claimed that the smallpox vaccine
Speaker 1: is what killed him, even though he died seven months
Speaker 1: after being vaccinated, So it wasn't I mean, no, it
Speaker 1: was not. But at the time, like who knows, like
Speaker 1: you know, there's not much science back then, Like he
Speaker 1: got seven months later, it's like he probably got sick.
Speaker 1: What it was is he got sick from the vaccine
Speaker 1: because that's what the vaccine did, and he got sick
Speaker 1: again shortly thereafter. And I think to her it just
Speaker 1: looked like he was sick continually after it, even though
Speaker 1: like lady, it's eighteen ninety six, half of the kids die,
Speaker 1: like kids just die for no reason. Yeah, he shouldn't
Speaker 1: have named him that was a bad call speaking of
Speaker 1: not naming babies. Uh Anna, are you a fan of
Speaker 1: products and services? Um? Yeah, okay, well that's an ad pivot.
Speaker 1: We're back products services. I'll try them. You should try them.
Speaker 1: You know what else? You should try? Vaccination? Fine, I'll
Speaker 1: get a flu shot. I won't. I mean, I keep
Speaker 1: being like I don't work with kids anymore. I do.
Speaker 1: If I'm going to like a family reunion and I
Speaker 1: know I'm gonna be around old people, you do, because
Speaker 1: well I don't want to. Don't want to just like
Speaker 1: my old my elderly relative sick with because they could
Speaker 1: die from there. I would have never even thought about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like that's the main reason. Like I don't care my
Speaker 1: other my roommates are also early thirties, late twenties, Like
Speaker 1: we all get each other sick once a year. It's whatever.
Speaker 1: I don't want to get someone who could die from
Speaker 1: the flu sick. I'm so selfish that when I was
Speaker 1: teaching kindergarten, I got the flu shot only because I
Speaker 1: was like, third can get me sick. At no point
Speaker 1: was I like it's for them. When I taught special ed, uh,
Speaker 1: I never got sick and I never got vaccinated just
Speaker 1: because like you're exposed to every Like that's true. The
Speaker 1: first six months I was sick a lot, and then
Speaker 1: after that I was like fucking iron I had like strapped,
Speaker 1: I was sick all the time. And then yeah, and
Speaker 1: then you're just like invulnerable. Ship. The zombie plague can
Speaker 1: hit tomorrow. I'll fight that ship off. It's like, how
Speaker 1: do people not believe immunity by exposure is a thing
Speaker 1: when literally, that is what happens in life. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: why teachers are are so terrifying and powerful. That's why
Speaker 1: that's why I don't funk with them. So yeah. Laura
Speaker 1: Little of Minneapolis lost her her little kid, uh, and
Speaker 1: then became a major anti vaccine advocate. She became the
Speaker 1: editor of a magazine called The Liberator, an early anti
Speaker 1: vax pro fringe medicine magazine basically the Natural News of
Speaker 1: its day. Now you may also recognize there was an
Speaker 1: earlier Liberator and the abolitionist era before the Civil War.
Speaker 1: It was an abolitionist newspaper. She named her anti vaccine
Speaker 1: newspaper The Liberator because she saw anti vaccination advocacy as
Speaker 1: part of the same intellectual tradition as abolitionism, and it
Speaker 1: kind of was the same, a lot of the same people,
Speaker 1: Like there were a lot of the older people in
Speaker 1: the active vaccine movement pre Civil War had been abolitionists.
Speaker 1: I guess it's tough now, Yeah, it's getting tough. It's complicated,
Speaker 1: it's really complicated because these are not bad people. They're
Speaker 1: wrong about this, but they're like in eight six being like,
Speaker 1: ladies should vote. Racism is bad. No one else is
Speaker 1: saying that. Yeah, but they're also saying the smallpox vaccine
Speaker 1: is the devil. It's out of step with how science works.
Speaker 1: But again, science wasn't great at this point. Still even still,
Speaker 1: that's right. Yeah. So Laura did work in The Liberator
Speaker 1: that did virgin real journalism. She interviewed the parents of
Speaker 1: children who died as a result of vaccination has gone
Speaker 1: wrong and kids did die as a result. Eighteen nineties
Speaker 1: was not nearly as good as it is now. The
Speaker 1: error rate was a lot higher. One of her was
Speaker 1: titled Crimes of the cow Pox Ring Some moving pictures
Speaker 1: thrown on the dead wall of official silence, solid title.
Speaker 1: Anti vaccine advocates had other tactics besides rioting. Many of
Speaker 1: them would protect their kids by giving them fake vaccination scars,
Speaker 1: or if they couldn't stop their kids from being vaccinated,
Speaker 1: they would attempt to scrub the vaccine out of the
Speaker 1: arm after it was inserted. I'm sorry, both those things
Speaker 1: are horrible, horrible. Now, it would probably be unfair to
Speaker 1: call the people who did that anti vaxers. They were
Speaker 1: anti their kids getting vaccinated because they didn't want their
Speaker 1: kid to get sick. But the anti vaccine movement as
Speaker 1: an ideological movement was a very different thing, and it
Speaker 1: was more wrapped up in like freedom of choice and
Speaker 1: resistance to racism in that sort of him So it's wonky.
Speaker 1: Many early anti vaxxers were doctors, or at least doctors
Speaker 1: doing the hand quote sign, because again, the late eighteen
Speaker 1: hundreds and early nineteen hundreds was the period in which
Speaker 1: medicine was starting to become real. Up until that point,
Speaker 1: to most Americans, a doctor of homeopathy was probably just
Speaker 1: as credible as a Stanford surgeon. Most medicine was just
Speaker 1: whiskey and hands at this point. So people were not
Speaker 1: nearly as dumb as they are today for distrusting medical science.
Speaker 1: Were they letting blood? Oh yeah, all the time, and
Speaker 1: you know that's not always pretty to do, but like,
Speaker 1: like this is the point where anyone can call themselves
Speaker 1: a doctor. In the medical community was just starting to
Speaker 1: figure out, Okay, well some of us are actually doctors,
Speaker 1: and some of us are charlatan's, and like a lot
Speaker 1: of the charlatan's wound up on the anti vaccine side
Speaker 1: of things because they were pro natural medicine or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. I mean, I think it's echoed today in
Speaker 1: how we trust doctors and how younger doctors are using
Speaker 1: newer technology and newer strategies, but the older doctors aren't
Speaker 1: always doing the medes. Now, there was a lot of
Speaker 1: reason to distrust the credible doctors and mainstream medical science
Speaker 1: at this point. One thing that would have been in
Speaker 1: living memory from any of the people doing this was
Speaker 1: during the Civil War, Robert E. Lee's army, the Army
Speaker 1: of Northern Virginia had five thousand men rendered combat ineffective
Speaker 1: before the battle Chancellor's Bill because when they've been vaccinated,
Speaker 1: the doctor had accidentally used part of a syphilis or
Speaker 1: in order to make the vaccine. Oh my god, So
Speaker 1: they all got yeah, that's true. That does feel like
Speaker 1: that does feel like karma. Wow, that's crazy. That is
Speaker 1: crazy that doctor gets like stone today he would hope,
Speaker 1: so right, like even though like that's a pretty big
Speaker 1: oh yeah, maybe he was like a that's the movie
Speaker 1: or the show that that's the show. Like a doctor
Speaker 1: like infecting the Confederate army with syphilis. That's such a
Speaker 1: smart that's a really smart because that five thousand men,
Speaker 1: that's like a fucking that's like half a division or
Speaker 1: something like that. That's a lot of combat strength lost. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty cool, pretty cool. But for the people in this
Speaker 1: era is a like that that would have been a
Speaker 1: famous example of like, well, you can't trust these doctors.
Speaker 1: I don't want my kid getting syphilis, right that actually
Speaker 1: that did happen. So you've got all these doctors who
Speaker 1: are chiropractors and homeopaths, and they are basically fighting a
Speaker 1: war within the medical establishment with what we know today
Speaker 1: is real doctors. But we're at that time not a
Speaker 1: whole lot more credible. You know. The vice president of
Speaker 1: the Anti Vaccination Society of America was what was known
Speaker 1: as a botanical physician. He prefers to use natural, plant
Speaker 1: based medicine rather than pharmaceutical drugs, and you know, mercury. Uh.
Speaker 1: This guy, Dr Climber wrote a tract called Vaccination Brought
Speaker 1: Home to You. His sources were mainstream medical textbooks which
Speaker 1: talked extensively about the very real side effects of that
Speaker 1: error's vaccines. So he's basically taking books written by his
Speaker 1: professional rifles and cherry picking the evidence that made them
Speaker 1: look bad to an uneducated mass. Another made yeah, well
Speaker 1: smart not not a bad strategy. Another major anti vaccine
Speaker 1: advocate was Dr J. W. Hodge, a homeopath in Niagara Falls,
Speaker 1: and one speech in nineteen o two, he stated, compulsory
Speaker 1: vaccination ranks with human slavery and religious persecution is one
Speaker 1: of the most flagrant outrages upon the rights of the
Speaker 1: human race. So these physicians and laymen and lame women
Speaker 1: anti vactor's blanketed the nation and pamphlets and books outlining
Speaker 1: their case against vaccination. According to the book Pox Quote,
Speaker 1: violent imagery pervaded the anti vaccination texts. The frontist piece
Speaker 1: of Climber's book pictured a police officer armed with a
Speaker 1: copy of the vaccination law seizing a baby from its
Speaker 1: mother's lap while the angel of death waited with open arms.
Speaker 1: Laura Little found material enough in the public record quote.
Speaker 1: It is for this hellish work that churches, theaters, and
Speaker 1: business blocks and whole neighborhoods have been rated, she wrote.
Speaker 1: Ocean liners populations cow poxed, a shipload of Negro laborers,
Speaker 1: driven off the vessel with clubs at Panama and poisoned
Speaker 1: in spite of resistance. Arrests have been made, in innocent
Speaker 1: persons cast into jail and they're jabbed with the virus.
Speaker 1: And most atrocious of all, the annual army of babies
Speaker 1: graduating from nursery into school are required to bear their
Speaker 1: little arms and receive this injection of disease from middle
Speaker 1: class anti vaccinationists. The plight of the working class vaccine refusers,
Speaker 1: pinioned by police officers and vaccinated revealed the tyranny and
Speaker 1: despotism of the entire system of state medicine. If this
Speaker 1: can be done and upheld by the legal machinery of
Speaker 1: the state, what next have we do, expect, asked climber.
Speaker 1: Why not chase people and circumcise them. It surely would
Speaker 1: be a good preventative against certain kinds of disease. Why
Speaker 1: not catch the people and give each a compulsory bath.
Speaker 1: So again, this is not even when the cooks are
Speaker 1: bringing up this is not These are some real questions
Speaker 1: to ask. That's the first time in society a dealt
Speaker 1: with this like what it is a valid question, and
Speaker 1: I I see how compulsory vaccination in its form spurred
Speaker 1: that question individual rights. It did. Now, the anti vaccine
Speaker 1: movement saw an enormous success for a time. By the
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds, the US was known as the least
Speaker 1: vaccinated of any quote civilized country means the white country.
Speaker 1: And however high minded their arguments, lack of vaccination was
Speaker 1: just as likely to cause deadly outbreaks then as it
Speaker 1: is now. In March of nineteen hundred, the town of Jonesville, Mississippi,
Speaker 1: was hit by an especially brutal variant of the smallpox virus.
Speaker 1: Seventy of the people who caught this box died from it,
Speaker 1: and since vaccination rates were so low in Jonesville, it
Speaker 1: was not uncommon for whole families to be wiped out,
Speaker 1: just found dead in their homes, entire family lines. So
Speaker 1: this again, most of what's hitting in this period is
Speaker 1: the less deadly version of smallpox, but every now and
Speaker 1: then you have one of these murder variants creep up.
Speaker 1: Which is why it's so important to vaccinate people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is why the doctors who are burning down
Speaker 1: houses are like, no, I really need to be burning
Speaker 1: down houses and like forcing people at gunpoint to do this.
Speaker 1: That's interesting. It seems like there is this push and
Speaker 1: pull at least up until this point of like once
Speaker 1: people start to forget how deadly the virus is, yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't need vaccination. And that's when I think comes
Speaker 1: back and Jonesville, Mississippi, gets wiped out. Yeah. Now Utah
Speaker 1: and it's largely Mormon citizenry, were eager converts to the
Speaker 1: anti vaccine cause. They also had a nightmarish smallpox outbreak
Speaker 1: in nineteen hundred. Three thousand people caught the disease, twenty
Speaker 1: six of them diet that was fortunately one of the
Speaker 1: less deadly variants of it. In nineteen or three, a
Speaker 1: group of Michigan anti vaxers led by Laura Little had
Speaker 1: a Brexit level legislative surprise victory when they passed a
Speaker 1: build and made it legal to compel any child to
Speaker 1: get vaccinated or require vaccination to let a child into school.
Speaker 1: The states doctors were outraged and succeeded in getting the
Speaker 1: bill amended to allow them to at least force vaccinations
Speaker 1: during an outbreak. As you'd expect, the anti vaccine victory
Speaker 1: in Michigan was followed three years later by a nightmare
Speaker 1: smallpox epidemic. Twenty eight thousand people got sick. WHOA, that's
Speaker 1: so much again. I'm not going to say Laura Little
Speaker 1: is a bad person, but she got twenty eight thousand
Speaker 1: people sick with smallpox. Yeah, for good reason. She wasn't
Speaker 1: a fun You get a lot of credit for me
Speaker 1: if you're not racist in nineteen o three and you're
Speaker 1: a white lady, like, yeah, that's not She was woke
Speaker 1: by their standards. Yeah, she thought it was bad to
Speaker 1: like force black people off of boats and reject them
Speaker 1: with drugs against their will, which most people would have
Speaker 1: been liable. They don't have a right to say no. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Oh gosh, this is so tangled about. It's really tangled
Speaker 1: up anti vaccine advocates. Whereas you might expect pretty likely
Speaker 1: to die of smallpox, putting him j Ramsdell of Cambridge,
Speaker 1: Massachusetts was a prominent Christian scientist and anti vaxer. When
Speaker 1: he died in nineteen o two, the New York Times
Speaker 1: reported that he had quote died of the disease. He defied, Wow,
Speaker 1: I love that. Here's pox in Charlotte, North Carolina. Five
Speaker 1: vaccine refusers died of the disease later that year. In
Speaker 1: June three, on the very same day that the Minnesota
Speaker 1: legislature enacted the anti compulsion VAX law he had championed,
Speaker 1: the Minneapolis anti vaccination ist Charles Stevens died of smallpox
Speaker 1: at his home. These people are often like dying while
Speaker 1: they're advocating against the vaccine. This is like when people
Speaker 1: are against public funded healthcare. Yeah, it's like, yeah, just
Speaker 1: wait till you get canceled. Just wait till you can yeah,
Speaker 1: or wait till your fucking barista spreads a deadly disease
Speaker 1: to you because they couldn't afford to take the day
Speaker 1: off of work because they don't get sick. Yeah it's coming, okay.
Speaker 1: So the most interesting side of this to me is
Speaker 1: the sort of conflict betwe in all these pro and
Speaker 1: anti vaccine doctors. This battle came to a head in
Speaker 1: the story of doctor Samuel Durkin. He was a lecturer
Speaker 1: at Harvard and chairman of the Boston Board of Health.
Speaker 1: He was a real doctor. Now, Massachusetts was at this
Speaker 1: time going through its worst smallpox outbreak in generations, and Durgan,
Speaker 1: as a young man, had lived in an outbreak that
Speaker 1: had killed like a thousand people, so he was like,
Speaker 1: hated smallpox. Okay, well, I mean that seems like it's
Speaker 1: what it takes. Yeah, it's hundreds of people died. YEA
Speaker 1: one causal factor was that in eighteen ninety four, anti
Speaker 1: vaccine advocates that secured their equivalent to the conscience and
Speaker 1: Subject or exemption, allowing parents to secure a doctor's note
Speaker 1: saying their child was unfit for vaccination. Since there were
Speaker 1: plenty of anti VAXX doctors, any parent could find a
Speaker 1: physician willing to exempt their kid. So, while this epidemic
Speaker 1: was infecting hundreds of people and spreading into Boston, a
Speaker 1: newsletter started going around town advising parents to exempt their
Speaker 1: children from vaccination, stating quote, there are hundreds of physicians
Speaker 1: in Massachusetts who are well aware of the uselessness and
Speaker 1: evil effects of vaccination. When The Boston Globe reached out
Speaker 1: to Dr Durgan about this newsletter, he issued a challenge, quote,
Speaker 1: if there are among the adult and leading members of
Speaker 1: the anti vaccinationists who would like an opportunity to show
Speaker 1: the people their sincerity and what they profess. I will
Speaker 1: make arrangements by which that belief may be tested. In
Speaker 1: the effect of such an exhibition of faith by exposer
Speaker 1: to smallpox without vaccination be made clear. So he's like,
Speaker 1: come at me, anti vax doctors, Well, we'll take you
Speaker 1: to a smallpox ward and like, see if your methods
Speaker 1: of avoiding smallpox work better than well their method is,
Speaker 1: I'll never go there. Well no, I mean their method
Speaker 1: They had all these kookie things about like no, no,
Speaker 1: you just gotta exercise and the vegetables and stuff like.
Speaker 1: The doctors aren't like people like people like Laura Little
Speaker 1: are ideologically being like this, it's wrong to force vaccines.
Speaker 1: A lot of these doctors are being like no, no, no,
Speaker 1: homeopathy will keep you safe. Right, listen to me. My
Speaker 1: profession is my professions right. So Dark and straight up
Speaker 1: hated the anti vaccine movement, and he particularly reviled the
Speaker 1: men who called themselves doctors. Among that crowd, he called
Speaker 1: anti vaxers quote a class of men whose minds are
Speaker 1: so curiously constituted that they will select for study the
Speaker 1: nether side of the social fabric, the weakness of the
Speaker 1: best of governments, and the minor defects in the character
Speaker 1: of the world's heroes. Emmanuel Phifer was one of these doctors.
Speaker 1: He was a major advocate of Kouk medicine as well
Speaker 1: as an anti vaxer. Back in April of that year,
Speaker 1: he'd argued in court that the state should not interfere
Speaker 1: with quote any cosmopath, clairvoyant, hypnotist, magnetic healer, mind curist,
Speaker 1: messur osteopath, or Christian scientist. Phifer was yeah, shots fired,
Speaker 1: don't know what a cosmopath is, but real excited about
Speaker 1: that word. Someone who believes your diseases come from the
Speaker 1: stars and the that's what we're going to choose to
Speaker 1: go with. Yeah. Now. Phifer was a registered physician who
Speaker 1: believed he could here quote all kinds of chronic diseases
Speaker 1: just by simple laying on of hands. He was what
Speaker 1: he was, a health nut and believe that good diet,
Speaker 1: proper exercise, and moral behavior were enough to protect you
Speaker 1: from a disease like smallpox. In nineteen o two, he
Speaker 1: took Dr Durgan up on his offer and went to
Speaker 1: visit the Smallpox Board on Gallops Island. Less than two
Speaker 1: weeks later, Dr Phifer disappeared. Suddenly, this very public man
Speaker 1: who had abandoned his practice and dropped off the face
Speaker 1: of the earth. Dr Durgan launched a five day man
Speaker 1: hunt to find him, which eventually revealed that he had
Speaker 1: gotten tremendously ill from smallpox and was dying in a farmhouse.
Speaker 1: So what happened after this is what I'm gonna tell you.
Speaker 1: When they found him, the Board of Health announced that
Speaker 1: he probably would not survive. Here's pox quote. How many
Speaker 1: had been exposed to smallpox in these days. Between Fifer's
Speaker 1: disappearance and the arrival of the health officials at his
Speaker 1: Bedford bedside, no one knew. Bedford officials placed the Fifer
Speaker 1: farm under quarantine, ordering all on the premises vaccinated. Learning
Speaker 1: that Fiffer's two daughters had been to school since his arrival,
Speaker 1: officials ordered all the town's pupils to get vaccinated or
Speaker 1: stay home. Boston authorities tracked down two carriages in which
Speaker 1: Fifer had traveled and disinfected them. All of the residents
Speaker 1: of the Charlestown apartment house were vaccinated, to everyone's surprise,
Speaker 1: except perhaps his own. Emmanuel Phifer's famous constitution pulled him
Speaker 1: back from the brink of death, and he began his
Speaker 1: long recovery. The race for the moral high ground began.
Speaker 1: Even before his survival was assured. Durgan announced that several
Speaker 1: other physicians had visited Gallops Island that season, and, having
Speaker 1: previously been vaccinated, none came down with smallpox. Now a
Speaker 1: lot of people attacked Durgan after this, and we're like, dude,
Speaker 1: you just gave a guy smallpox and he went wandering
Speaker 1: around the world and infected a bunch of people. That's
Speaker 1: not good medicine. Which is a fair point. That's a
Speaker 1: fair point. But I can see both sides latching onto
Speaker 1: a different read of what happened, and they sure as
Speaker 1: ship did. Dr Phifer's anti vaccine sentiments did not change,
Speaker 1: and in fact, he used this the fact that he
Speaker 1: had survived, as proof that he was right all along,
Speaker 1: even though he got horribly ill and very nearly died. Uh,
Speaker 1: nobody changes their minds based on evidence, Anna, No, that's true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the United States at least drifted further and further
Speaker 1: away from supporting quack medicine after this point. Roughly a
Speaker 1: year after this, another Massachusetts man, Pastor Jacobson, would be
Speaker 1: charged with refusing a mandatory vaccine during an outbreak. He
Speaker 1: was taken to court, convicted, and found guilty of the
Speaker 1: crime of refusing vaccination. Jacobson appealed in this case eventually
Speaker 1: made its way up to the Supreme Court. When they
Speaker 1: ruled on Jacobson v. Massachusetts in nineteen o five, the
Speaker 1: ability of the government to compel vaccinations, even with the
Speaker 1: use of police force was uppelled. This decision, along with
Speaker 1: the fact that vaccines grew more effective and less terrible
Speaker 1: over the next few decades, lead to the gradual extinction
Speaker 1: of the American anti vax movement, at least for a while. Now.
Speaker 1: There's a really fucked up code to this, because when
Speaker 1: eugenics became a thing, which starts right after this point
Speaker 1: nineteen teens and twenties, is when the American eugenics movement
Speaker 1: starts sterilizing tens of thousand people. And when I guess
Speaker 1: what their main legal cited precedent is compulsory compulsory vaccination.
Speaker 1: If we can vaccinate people to stop the spread of sickness,
Speaker 1: why can't we sterilize people to stop the spread of sickness?
Speaker 1: So again all of this is tangled up so as
Speaker 1: compulsory anything is like you're on a slippery slope and
Speaker 1: you don't always a slippery slope does not always mean things.
Speaker 1: Because we have compulsory vaccination today and we don't sterilize
Speaker 1: people for no good reasons today it does. It's just
Speaker 1: like how you know, but you can opt out today
Speaker 1: also some places some places you can't, and that that
Speaker 1: may be changing with with all the out breaks that
Speaker 1: have happened. It's sort of like how um when you
Speaker 1: Listee Simpson grant past the Anti KKK Act that like
Speaker 1: allowed the government to arrest people for essentially what were
Speaker 1: their political opinions. It could have gone on a slippery
Speaker 1: slope and like led to an authoritarian regime, but instead
Speaker 1: of just led to a bunch of clansmen getting jailed.
Speaker 1: So fine, we don't always go down the slippery slope.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you just have to be very careful with the
Speaker 1: actions you're taking. Measured, measured, and uh yeah, So that
Speaker 1: was a morally complicated and confusing episode. Next episode, which
Speaker 1: will be running tomorrow for you, we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about something that's not morally confusing, and we will be
Speaker 1: talking about a real bastard, a guy named Andrew Wakefield
Speaker 1: looking forward to getting a little bit less ambiguity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't know which side to take. There's no side
Speaker 1: to take. It's just an important story. If you're gonna
Speaker 1: we're really getting behind the bastards here, Yes, truly, this
Speaker 1: is the behind the behind. Yeah, this was really far behind.
Speaker 1: Tomorrow next episode we'll just be talking about a bastard.
Speaker 1: So yeah, all right, that's the episode. What do I
Speaker 1: do at the end of an evo? Oh god, oh god, panic, panic,
Speaker 1: panic and plugables. You can check my web comic out
Speaker 1: on Instagram. It's bad Comics with an X. Buy on
Speaker 1: a two ends and that's also my handle on Twitter.
Speaker 1: Followed me on the social media's and uh, if you
Speaker 1: have a interpretation of that coming tune that we saw
Speaker 1: and described, uh, tell us about it. Yeah, please do.
Speaker 1: It'll be up on our website, Behind the Bastards dot com.
Speaker 1: You can find us on social media and uh, you
Speaker 1: know Twitter. In the Graham at at Bastards pot the
Speaker 1: kids call it the Graham And I didn't know if
Speaker 1: here I didn't pick at whoa that's even faster? Yeah,
Speaker 1: what about just g oh find us on the g
Speaker 1: at at Bastards pod. You can find me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at I right, okay, and nowhere else because Instagram frightens
Speaker 1: and confuses me. No, I see your comics on your Twitter.
Speaker 1: I occasionally post on you tweet some comics. Um, you
Speaker 1: can also buy a shirt. Uh. You can buy cups,
Speaker 1: you can buy stickers. You can buy smallpox vaccines from
Speaker 1: behind the Bastard shop on t public dot com. They're
Speaker 1: less vaccines and more smallpox infected T shirts, but they
Speaker 1: work probably the same way. Um, I probably shouldn't say
Speaker 1: that our shirts have smallpox. Well just delete this part. No,
Speaker 1: you can't edit audio. Anna, Oh this is going in
Speaker 1: but I already ordered six T shirts. Well, just make
Speaker 1: sure you give them to people who spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time around cows. They'll probably be fine. Yeah, milk
Speaker 1: means milkmaids. All right, that's the end of the show.
Speaker 1: Go home, do something else. I love you, goodbye. H
Speaker 1: m hm