A Pox on Fools: The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines

In this enlightening account, science writer Levenson (So Very Small) surveys 300 years of vaccine opposition. Noting that much of today’s antivax rhetoric is in fact centuries old, he starts with the first smallpox inoculations in the 18th century, finding that vaccine skepticism has long taken the same few approaches. They include religious interpretations of inoculation as “a prideful intervention in God’s plan”; fears of the peril posed by experimental science (sometimes a legitimate concern—the author doesn’t shy away from examining catastrophic medical failures, like a 1955 incident in which vaccines induced live polio in children resulting in paralysis and death); and notions that compulsory vaccination is an affront to individual liberty. At times, these arguments come from surprising sources, like Walt Whitman, who lumped vaccines alongside steamboats and gunpowder as “unnatural interventions that rendered people less ‘peaceable and happy,’ ” and who, Levenson perceptively notes, “sketched much of what would become the modern wellness program” in his Manly Health and Training. Indeed, the similarities to today’s antivax movement that Levenson surfaces are often uncanny, like an 1805 pamphlet that fearmongered about vaccinated children experiencing “a train of symptoms... similar to those which always arise from an absorption of extraneous and poisonous matter.” The result is a trenchant demonstration of how contemporary antivax ideology is not only inaccurate but rooted in outmoded, antimodern sentiments. (May)