Anti-Vaccine Pamphlets Are Coming Back!

The Real Truth About Vaccines

Vaccine-preventable diseases aren’t the only things coming back…

Hopefully these Amish communities will begin to get vaccinated if they are reminded that measles is deadly.

Anti-vaccine pamphlets are making a comeback too.

Anti-Vaccine Pamphlets Are Coming Back!

You probably don’t know this, but pamphlets have played a major role in the history of the anti-vaccine movement.

After all, before the internet, anti-vaccine influencers had few other ways to scare people away from getting vaccinated, so they used these kinds of pamphlets to publish their misinformation and propaganda.

Anti-vaccine pamphlets like:

• John Williams, Several Arguments, Proving, That Inoculating the Small Pox Is Not Contained in the Law of Physick, Either Natural or Divine, and Therefore Unlawful - 1721

• Edmund Massey, A Sermon Against the Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation - 1722

• Benjamin Moseley, On the Cow-Pox - 1800

• William Rowley, Cow-Pox Inoculation No Security Against Small-Pox Infection - 1805

• John Birch, Serious Reasons for Uniformly Objecting to the Practice of Vaccination - 1806

• John Gibbs, Our Medical Liberties - 1854

• Robert A. Gunn, M.D., Vaccination: Its Fallacies and Evils - 1882

• William White, The Story of a Great Delusion - 1885

• C. Wardell Amerige, M.D., Vaccination a Curse - 1895

• Alfred Russel Wallace, Vaccination a Delusion: Its Penal Enforcement a Crime - 1898

• Charles M. Higgins, Horrors of Vaccination Exposed and Illustrated - 1908

• John Pitcairn, The Fallacy of Vaccination - 1911

Anti-vaccine pamphlets that had more extreme titles than might be seen today, but had the same basic messages: that vaccines are dangerous (or evil), that vaccines don’t work, and that vaccines are not even necessary.

What else?

These pamphlets, often with associated protests, were published whenever the anti-vaccine movement got popular.

And guess what often followed?

That’s right!

Outbreaks.

Outbreaks, which led to everyone getting vaccinated and a big drop in support for the anti-vaccine movement - at least for a time, until folks would once again would forget that vaccines were safe and necessary.

It’s a cycle that helps explain that while anti-vaccine influencers come and go, we keep getting new vaccines and why more diseases are now vaccine-preventable.

It’s a cycle that you can stop if you become more skeptical, stop listening to them, and get vaccinated and protected.

More on the History of the Anti-Vaccine Movement

• Anti-Vaccine Movement Timeline and History

• How Was the Hundredth Anniversary of the Smallpox Vaccine Celebrated?

• How Misinformed and Irresponsible Parents Led to Outbreaks of Smallpox

• Benjamin Franklin Regretted Letting His Son Die of Smallpox

• Lewis Carroll’s Adventures in Anti-VaccineLand

• How an Anti-Vaccine Safety Handbook Has Caused the Longest Measles Outbreak in Recent History

• History of Anti-Vaccination Movements

• A History of Hesitancy

• Ye Olde Anti-Vaxxers

• Anti-Vaccination Pamphlets from the Jesse Mercer Gehman Collection, ca. 1900-1946

• Death, The Vaccinator

• COVID-19 anti-vaxxers use the same arguments from 135 years ago