Thanks to these and many other vaccinations, measles was declared eradicated in the United States in 2000. But now, measles is making a comeback, with cases reported from California to Vermont.
CBS News
One big reason is that in 2023, more families across the country than ever before have exempted their children from routine vaccinations.
“There has never been a better time in human history to fight infectious diseases,” said Dr. Howard Markel, a retired medical historian from the University of Michigan. “There’s a lot we can do, from vaccines to antivirals to antibiotics. But I’m astonished at the volume of anti-vaccination voices.”
A history of vaccine hesitancy
Vaccine hesitancy is as old as the United States, according to Markel. In the 1700s, when smallpox hit the colonies, some people received an early form of vaccination called variolation. “You went to a doctor with infectious material, like dried pus or remnants of smallpox scars,” Markel said. “They would cut you open, cut your arm, and inoculate your arm with it, or ‘inject’ you. And half of the people got very sick, and some of them died. So it was expensive and it was dangerous.”
But those who recovered were immune.
Benjamin Franklin thought it was too dangerous for his sickly 4-year-old son, Frankie. “One of Franklin’s greatest regrets was not inoculating his son with the smallpox virus that would ultimately kill him,” Markel said.
In the 1800s, after a safer smallpox vaccine was developed, many cities and states made smallpox vaccination mandatory, including at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1902.
The students were outraged, says Elena Konis, a medical history professor at Berkeley, “and the townspeople cheered them on.”
In 1905, the Supreme Court ruled that the government had the power to mandate vaccinations. “Importantly, this decision had the effect of galvanizing many of the anti-vaccination groups,” Konis says, “and they believed they were the defenders of individual liberty.”
Victory over polio
But by the 1950s, there was something that united Americans: fear of polio. “The idea that your child could be paralyzed, or worse, put in an iron lung with their head sticking out of it and have to breathe for the rest of their life, terrified people,” Markel said.
Kiln Vintage Stock/Corbis via Getty Images
When Dr. Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine, he was seen as a hero. “The height of trust in the American medical-industrial complex was probably around the 1950s,” Markel says. “And then Dr. Jonas Salk and his wife and kids showed up, photogenic, and they saved the world.”
The 1950s was perhaps the height of vaccine adoption, when vaccines were developed for diseases like measles, mumps, and rubella. As Americans, especially children, became vaccinated, the incidence of these diseases plummeted.
But it all led straight to the counterculture era of the 1960s, Konis said. “As more and more doctors and public health officials started encouraging people to vaccinate, or vaccinate their children, people started saying, ‘Wait a minute. I need to ask you a question. What are these vaccines for? Who makes them? What’s in them? And why do we need them? Can you tell me?'”
The overwhelming medical consensus is that the benefits of vaccines far outweigh the risks, but the anti-vaccination movement gained momentum after a 1998 study published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet falsely linked the measles vaccine to autism.
It took 12 years for this magazine to be published. Retracting a study after concluding that it was fraudulent.
Pro- and anti-vaccine voices
Dr. Peter Hotez has worked on vaccine development for decades at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital. “If you would have asked me 40 years ago that I would be defending vaccines like I am now, I would have said you were crazy,” he said. “We all know that vaccinations are life-saving.”
One study estimates that COVID vaccines will have saved more than 3 million American lives by the end of 2022. And, according to Hotez, “up to 200,000 Americans will have died unnecessarily because they refused to get the COVID vaccine.”
He has participated in public debate as a staunch supporter of vaccines, telling an audience at Northwestern University in Chicago, “I worry that there is an all-out attack on biomedical science…. When we talk about the anti-vaccine, anti-science movement, we call it misinformation or an infodemic – as if it’s just random garbage on the internet. But it’s not. I want to convince you today that it is organized, intentional, politically motivated and it’s having devastating effects.” This was somewhat of a rebuke.
Hotez believes that historical reasons for vaccine resistance have been reinforced by politics, with prominent figures such as former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. expressing vaccine skepticism.
When asked why he doesn’t want others to get vaccinated, Hotez said, “It’s a form of political control, and it’s part of creating a new issue to galvanize your base.”
Asked if he was concerned about where the vaccine currently stands in the eyes of the general public, Konis said, “I’m not surprised at all. In some ways, we’ve been in similar situations before. Vaccine hesitancy springs up as we use the vaccine more and as we use the power of the law more to encourage or mandate vaccination. When I hear the debate and when I hear people complain about not getting vaccinated, people ask me how come they don’t understand, and my answer is, ‘Let’s understand their disbelief, understand their concerns and take them seriously.'”
But for those of us trying to learn from the lessons of history, Hotez warns, the clock is ticking: “What we’re talking about today, COVID-19, H5N1, etc., is just the beginning. Mother Nature isn’t shying away from us. She’s saying, ‘I’m going to have a major pandemic every few years, so you’d better be prepared. And by the way, you’d better convince your population to accept vaccinations, or you’ll have an unprecedented disaster.'”
More information:
“Origin Stories: The Trials of Charles Darwin” by Dr. Howard Markel, medical historian and pediatrician (WW Norton & Co.) Available in hardcover, e-book, and audiobook formats at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org “Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Vaccinations” by Elena Konis, medical, public health, and environmental historian at the University of California, Berkeley (University of Chicago Press) Available in hardcover, trade paperback, e-book, and audiobook formats at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning” by Dr. Peter J. Hotez, Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital (Johns Hopkins University Press) Available in hardcover, trade paperback, and e-book formats at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org
Story produced by Alan Golds and Amiel Weissvogel. Edited by Remington Cooper.
reference:
More from CBS News
John Rapock
