Vaccine-preventable diseases aren’t the only things coming back…
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, 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
How Was the Hundredth Anniversary of the Smallpox Vaccine Celebrated?
How Misinformed and Irresponsible Parents Led to Outbreaks of Smallpox
How an Anti-Vaccine Safety Handbook Has Caused the Longest Measles Outbreak in Recent History
Anti-Vaccination Pamphlets from the Jesse Mercer Gehman Collection, ca. 1900-1946
COVID-19 anti-vaxxers use the same arguments from 135 years ago