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.

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