Part One: The Birth of the Anti-Vaccine Movement

In episode 48, Robert is joined by Anna Salinas to discuss the origins of the anti-vaccine movement. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hmm, that's behind the bastards. I'm Robert Evans. This is
the show I do about bad people in the history
behind them and the things you don't know about them. Uh.
My guest for this episode is comics artist of Bad Comics.
I pronounced it with an X. I hope you appreciate that,
Anna Selena's how you doing, Anna, I'm good, Thanks for

(00:20):
having me. How are you feeling today? Well, you know,
I'm excited to learn about today's topic. Um, I am
a little uh nervous because there are certain vaccines that
I haven't gotten. I guess I'm tipping the hand a

(00:41):
little bit, But I why amn't you've gotten them just
because I don't get flu shots usually just because a laziness.
Laziness not ideological. No, it's fine to endanger people out
of laziness, right right. I'm just about to hear the
magnitude by which I have endangered people. I think, Well, Uh,
you're a fan of vaccines. Yeah, I'm I'm a general

(01:03):
fan of Yeah. As someone who has never gotten like
polio as amad, I'm a I'm a big ups on
that stuff. Today we're going to be talking in detail
about the anti vaccine movement. Uh. And when I first started,
this was all going to be about the modern anti
vax movement. We were going to talk about, you know,
all the everything from Andrew Wakefield on. And as I

(01:24):
started researching, I realized that it actually it goes back
a lot further than that. Um, so this is going
to be kind of a kind of a deep h
I'm excited, alright. Alright, So right now as you and
I talk, the Pacific Northwest is dealing with a measled outbreak.
Fifty cases have been confirmed in an area around the
city of Portland, Oregon, both in Oregon and Washington because

(01:47):
kind of some of the suburbs of Portland, Oregon are
actually parts of Washington, like Clark County. And that number
kept creeping up as I was writing. This was like
thirty five when I started on the episode, and it's
fifty now and it will probably be you know, seven,
need to one hundred by the time you the people
listening to this right now in the future listen to it. Um. Portland,

(02:07):
Oregon is a really good city to have a outbreak
of a preventable disease like measles, because eight percent of
the children in that city are unvaccinated, meaning the pool
of infectable individuals is pretty high. Alongside New York and
certain affluent parts of California, the city of Portland is
a current stronghold of the anti vaccine movement. Oh, it's

(02:28):
like if you swing hipster enough, you end up at
And it's true for the far left and the far right.
This is one thing where like if you're if you're
like a fucking far left loony or you're like a fascist.
Both of those groups have sizeable people who are like
vaccines are a lie. Like you can get Alex Jones
and fucking uh, what's his name? Ace Ventura. Jim Carroty

(02:52):
on the same side of the vaccine trade is Jim Carrey. Also,
he was kind of for a while because he was
doating Jim McCarthy. Yeah, yeah, I'm not Actually, I'm actually
not going to hit on her much in this episode,
just because I don't know. I taught special lead for
a while, and I feel for a parent who's like
trying to grapple with something like that happening, I just

(03:12):
don't want to. Like she's she's definitely done a lot
of damage, but she's not the start of it. So
there's bigger fish. There's bigger fish to fry. So let's
let's get that pan out. Let's heat up some oil.
I just made to lap last night. Oh man, bread
it with like pank? What do you? What do you do?
You bred it? Are you? Are you just frying it?
I thought I was bredding it with parmesan to make
a protein heavy and it did it work? Oh man?

(03:36):
You know what I found that's really good is there's
this this kind of low carb flour called carb Quick
that has a shipload of protein in it. And you
mix a bunch of shredded up cheese and that and
then you fucking and you like crack an egg in that,
and then you don't do that. It's so that's what
That's what I'm doing next time. This is a podcast
where we talk about various recipes for frying fish in
order to make relate back to antivacxss it does it

(03:59):
does apia specifically specifically, of the fish, they are the
ones that resist vaccination the most. They do, and it's
because they're very left wing, not right wing. Well, finn
Finn is a wing. Yeah for the water. Anyway, let's
let's move into here. Yeah, so it would be hard
to consume media in the twenty one century and not
run into stories about the anti vax movement and how

(04:21):
it's been spurred on by the endorsement of celebrities. Uh,
the anti vaccine movement seems like a new problem, something
that could only be spread via the Internet's incredible ability
to make lives go viral. But the sad, weird reality
is that none of this is true. The anti vaccine
movement does not have its origins in the twenty first
century or the twentieth century. This ship has been going
on for more than two hundred years. It's almost as

(04:42):
old as the United States. So as long as there
have been vaccines, there have been people being like, yeah,
I don't believe it. Yeah, and in the case of
the United States, slightly longer. Yeah, that's what we're about
to get into. It's wild. So the story of vaccines,
and this thus the story of the anti vax movement,
starts with small box. Uh. Smallpox is a one of
those diseases that's so bad we almost can't really like

(05:04):
comprehend it, like a bolus scares people, but like it's
kind of hard to spread ebola once you know, what
it is like smallpox is super easy to spread um
from like direct transmission to transmission, and it's incredibly deadly.
Uh something like a third of people who get it die.
Um at least back in the day, people who got
it died. And the disease starts with a fever and

(05:27):
then ends with like this full body eruption of scabs,
Like you're just you're covered in scabs that leave behind
like crater your face and body and permanent scars for
the rest of your lives. So if you survive a
full small pox outbreak, it looks like someone blasted off
a bunch of bird shot into your face. Like you
look like you've been hunting with Dick Cheney after getting
this disease. It's just it's terrible And this is isn't

(05:50):
like in warfare people would throw the smallpox blankets as
a I mean, I don't think they would throw the blankets.
There's certainly been some use of smallpox and other illnesses
in warfare, like the Mongols would catapult like dead animals
over the sides of walls and stuff with the plague,
and uh, you know, I don't know enough about I

(06:10):
know that there's some controversy over whether or not smallpox
blankets were like intentionally spread, but the mortality rate among
Native Americans to smallpox was something um, so the majority, Like,
it's very likely that most of the deaths that occurred
of the hundred millionaires so people who died when the
Europeans started coming to North and South America, that most
of that was small box. Um, it just spread like wildfire.

(06:34):
Oh god. Because smallpox is a disease that comes from
the fact that we live around animals. You know. It's
like related to cow pox, which is the thing that
cows have that people can get, and that that's like
that that's the big reason why. I'm sure a lot
of people know this, but that's a big reason why
the Native Americans got so fucked over by European diseases.
They hadn't been living next to pigs and cows to

(06:54):
the same extent Europeans, so we were just like Europeans
are filthy. Oh my god. That's why I hate shows
where people go back in time to like the Middle
Ages and everything's fine. It's like, no, you would die
of the diseases and everything would stink so hard, it
would smell so bad. Yeah, I'm sorry, outlander, I don't

(07:15):
believe your premise. No, And in fact, the only people
that you could hang out around in that time period
who wouldn't stink would have been the Native Americans because
they were actually like pretty clean people and like lived
pretty clean lives and weren't surrounded by poop all the time. Yeah,
that's European cities in the Middle Ages and beyond. It's
just a pile of poop and corpses. Uh, we're getting

(07:36):
a little off topic here. So smallpox is terrible, um,
and it lasts a long time. Imagine the worst flu
you've ever had. It's like two weeks of flu followed
by like three weeks of scab eruptions. It's like a
month of being sick, and then you die, probably a
lot of times you die. By the end of the
eighteenth century, and estimated four thousand Europeans were dying every
year from smallpox. So that's a lot of people. Uh.

(07:58):
It killed like yeah, three and ten in but for
children and the elderly the death rate was much higher.
In London, most children would catch smallpox before their seventh birthday.
If there was an outbreak in town. It was not
uncommon for parents to avoid naming their babies just because like, well,
we gotta make sure. Let's let's see if he lives
through this smallpox thing, because nine out of ten fatal
smallpox cases involved children under the age of five. The

(08:20):
real baby killer here, like yeah, it's it wipes out
some babies. Now, the good news is that smallpox was
only spread by direct contact with a sufferer. At the time,
smallpox scabs were believed to be a main vector for
the disease, and it's possible for you to get smallpox
from smallpox scabs, but modern science has revealed that the
scabs are only really infectious when ground up, so it
was really just direct contact that was spreading most of

(08:42):
the time. So the good thing about smallpoxes that surprised
surviving it conferred a lifelong immunity to the disease. So
you get it once, you never get that ship again.
It's like the chicken pox, like all the boxes. That's
how boxes work. There you go. Starting in the tenth century,
Chinese doctors would grind up smallpox scabs and have people
snort them. This gave the patient a milder form of

(09:02):
the disease that conferred to short boll I love motorcycles,
but it almost was like tone music for what was happening. Yeah. Yeah,
So snort a bunch of smallpox scabs gives you a
short term immunity. Um, but like still like four, three
to five and a hundred would die from this treatment.
So it was better than if there's a from the
treatment itself. Yeah, So if there's smallpox spreading in your city,

(09:25):
it's best to snort some scabs because you get a
better chance of surviving that and you know you won't
get as many scars and stuff, but like it's still
really risky. Um. Now, in the twentieth century alone, smallpox
killed and estimated three hundred million human beings, more than
all of the centuries wars put together. So in the
nineteen hundreds, this was deadlier than World War One, World
War two, Vietnam, Korea, all of those fucking wars thrown

(09:48):
into a bucket small box killed more people. That's after
we had a vaccine after Yeah, the disease was I
think the last case was in the seventies and Somalia,
So it has been effectively eradicated in the wild. It's incredible. Yeah,
it took you know a while to get that ship done. So.
The road to eradicating smallpox started in seventeen ninety six
when Edward Jenner, a genius, gave a presentation to the

(10:09):
Royal Society of London. Jenner told them he'd inject the
thirteen people with life infectious material from the scabs of
people with cow pox, a disease related to smallpox. The
cow pox gave its victims an immunity to smallpox, and
so when exposed to smallpox later, these thirteen patients were unharmed.
Jenner named his new invention the vaccine because vacca means
cow in Latin. Yeah, it's cool, And he like, the

(10:31):
only reason he knew this is because like, as a
young man he was friends with like some milkmaids and
they would have like scabs on their hands and be like, yeah,
you get that from cows, but I can't get smallpox.
And he was like, what do you mean you can't
get smallpox? And he's like, oh, yeah, you get this
weird cow pox thing and you're fine. Ship, Wow, bring
women into the process. Sooner was he friends with them

(10:52):
or I don't I mean, I don't know, I don't
know the detail, just sucking a lot of milkmaids. Then
doesn't get smallpox himself, and it's like that he didn't either. No, no, no, no,
I'm just making that part of that was just a lie.
Jenner was the first person to formally describe a develop
a vaccine. His work sparked a massive medical renaissance and

(11:12):
is in many ways the birth of modern Western medicine.
It wouldn't be until the nineteen fifties when heat stable
versions of the smallpox vaccine would finally be figured out,
thus eliminating most of the negative side effects of the inoculation.
Jenner's work was a huge step forward, but vaccination was
still a very unpleasant process. Here's a quote from the
book Pox and American History, which I really recommend. With

(11:32):
a willing patient, the vaccine operation, as doctors called it,
lasted just a minute or two. The doctor took hold
of the patient's arms, scoring the skin with a needle
or lancet. He then dabbed on the vaccine, either by
taking a few droplets of liquid limph from a glass
tube or using a small ivory point coated with dry vaccine.
Either way, the vaccine contained live cow pox or vaccinia
virus that not long before had oozed from a sore

(11:54):
on the underside of an infected calf in a health
department stable In the coming days, the virus would produce
a sistr like vesicle on the vaccination side. In due course,
the lesion would heal, leaving a permanent scar the distinctive
vaccination psychatrics. If all went well, the patient would then
enjoy immunity from smallpox for five to seven years, sometimes longer.
So when you're immune, you can't pass on the disease,
you can't get it. You get a scar on your arm,

(12:16):
and you get sick, like some people are sick for
a week or two, like get a really bad flu
like it. It can take you out of commission for
a couple of weeks. So it's way better than getting smallpox,
but it's still really sucks, and that's important for what
comes next. So, because the societal cost of smallpox epidemics
was so high, governments around the world were quick to
embrace the new treatment. Many of the people in those countries, however,

(12:38):
were less than enthused about the idea of having pieces
of an infected caps or pushed under their arm, Like
it's gross. Yeah, yeah, somebody's taking like a scab from
a cow's right, and up until this point, I feel
like medicine has been pretty wonky, like with letting blood
and drinking mercury humors. So it's like, I can see

(13:01):
how that distrust continues. Yeah, it's not like today where
doctors make miracles happen every day. It was like, well
this guy, Also, what's the guy told my uncle to
drink all that mercury and then my uncle died from
drinking all that mercury. I don't want to trust him
more exactly. Not that Edward Jenner was a big mercury fan,
but like doctors in general, Like, right, the change I think,

(13:25):
and I'm really basing this off of the show Outlander,
but the change between people's understanding of science and medicine
seemed to be pretty this is when it was just starting. Yeah, yeah,
And so doctors are still like, it's not exactly a
highly thought of profession by many people, because so much
of medicine was bullshit at this point exactly, So that's

(13:46):
important to uh. The anti vaccine movement actually reached American
shores before vaccination did. In two years before Harvard doctor
performed the first US vaccinations A group of doctors and
priests in Boston created the first anti vaccination society. They
stated that vaccination was quote defiance to heaven itself, even
to the will of God. Yeah, it's fun stuff. So

(14:10):
two years before there's even vaccinations, there's people being like,
this is the devil. There's simply because you are putting
the disease into you. And they're like, there's no way.
I think for the for those people, because it was
like a religious thing, they were like, well, God wants
you to get sick or not right, and if you're

(14:32):
this is trying to like thwart the will of the
Lord h And I wonder too if it has to
do with power, like the people going out and saying
I can protect you, like the people with the church,
or older doctors saying this is how you're protected. If
someone else comes with an answer, yeah, because at that
point a lot of priests would have been like the
only way to protect yourself is to like get right

(14:53):
with God. And then some doctors like, well, no, we've
got this thing, and you're like, oh, we don't want
that going on here. Not in seven seen ninety eight, motherfucker.
It still doesn't feel that late. Yeah, you know it's
it's really not. Thomas Jefferson was the us is first
major vaccine advocate. Like he was the like during his presence,
he was like, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta get
on this ship. This is really working over in England,

(15:16):
um in eighteen o nine, smallpox vaccination was made mandatory
in Massachusetts. West Virginia followed soon after. In eighteen forty,
the British Parliament passed the Vaccination Act, which made it
illegal and punishable by fines for a parent to fail
to vaccinate their child. As vaccines spread through the West,
doctors started noticing something interesting. The smallpox virus appeared to
be dying out. They discovered something called herd immunity. When

(15:39):
a virus has nowhere to go because so many people
are immune, it eventually goes extinct, first in areas and
then perhaps worldwide. But the path to eradicating smallpox would
not be so simple, and cities like Stockholm in London concerned.
Parents began spreading rumors of the harms of vaccines and
complaining about the fines levied on them if they failed
to vaccinate their kids. Discover magazine had a great rite

(15:59):
up on this and they described these early anti vaxers
is mostly quote middle class citizens who didn't trust government,
science or medicine. Oh no, too close to home. Yeah,
nothing ever changes. I mean that's like this, what are
you doing? Well, Yeah, it's it's it's those those tricky Swedes,
you know. Every time. I want to root for him

(16:21):
because I love their sandwiches. I love just a pile
of bread with like white sauce and a just a
pile of tiny shrimp on it. The best sandwiches, that's
what it is. I can't even pronounce that. Ship. Yeah. Look,
I'll follow Sweden Twitter account until I die because it's
just the most delightful. But god damnit, Stockholm. I've had

(16:42):
one breakfast in Stockholm. One breakfast in Stockholm, and it
was like an actual restaurant and it was like told
to me, it's like a traditional Swedish like like breakfast buffet,
and it had all the beer I could drink at
eight in the morning. So I'm I love this. I
love Stockholm. But they were wrong about party Viking stock
So for a while the anti vaccine stuff was just talked.

(17:05):
But the rapid expansion of the global post in the
late eighteen hundreds, and the increased affordability of printing pamphlets
and magazines at the same time led to an explosion
of anti vaccine literature. Going to quote now from the
British Medical Journal, this is about like the anti vaccine
journals quote. The journals included the Anti Vaccinator founded eighteen
sixty nine, the National Anti Compulsory Vaccination Reporter eighteen seventy four,

(17:27):
and the Vaccination Inquirer eighteen seventy nine. Similar movements flourished
elsewhere in Europe and Stockholm, the majority of the population
began to refuse vaccination, so that by eighteen seventy two,
vaccination rates in Stockholm had fallen to just over whereas
they approached nine and the rest of Sweden. Fearing a
serious epidemic, the chief city physician demanded stricter measures. A

(17:48):
major epidemic in eighteen seventy four shocked the city and
led to widespread vaccination in an end to further epidemics.
So the Swedes did get the picture after like two epidemics,
Like maybe maybe anti vaccinations both ship. Yeah, when everyone
around you starts dying all this makes me think of
as my great grandma in Sweden who was so religious

(18:09):
just so for con pro church. I'm like, okay, I
getting Swedes have their bad side too, you know they do? Yeah,
they do? Uh now um, Great Britain did not get
the message in such a timely manner. The city of Leicester,
for some reason, became the nexus of an anti of
anti vaccine resistance. Groups of furious parents would gather in

(18:33):
March and show off signs. In five hundred thousand anti
vaccine advocates marched in Leicester. They hanged Dr Edward Jenner
and Effigy for the crime of inventing the smallpox. This
prompted the government to create a Royal Commission to investigate
the claims of the anti vaccine advocates and read evidence
on vaccines and their possible downsides. It released its report

(18:55):
in eighteen ninety six and concluded that vaccines worked and
said it also advocated ending government penalties for people who
refused vaccination, a new conscience clause, and the Vaccine Act
of eight allowed parents to receive a certificate of exemption.
This is actually the first time the phrase conscientious objector
was entered into English. That's while that's where it comes from.

(19:16):
That it's first of all so parallel to the penalties
if you didn't have healthcare with Obamacare, which just suck
it up. Let's just give yeah, the Western world that
that's where conscientious observer comes from. Objector objector. Yeah. So
within a decade, conscientious objectors accounted for one quarter of

(19:39):
all births in England. So it immediately gets out of hand. Uh.
Spurred on by this minor victory, the British anti vax
movement surged forward. I found an exerpt from one of
their magazines published right after this point. The goal seems
to be to herald their first major victory over the
evils of vaccines. I'm gonna hand this up a little
bit for you. I might try to do an act

(20:00):
sent We'll see if that's that's a good idea. We'll
know pretty quickly. Well, I hope a mighty and horrible
monster with the horns of a bull, the hind of
a horse, the jaws of a kraken, the teeth and
claws of a tiger, the tail of a cow, and
all the evils of Pandora's box in his belly, plague, pestilence, leprosy,
purple blotches, fetid ulcers in filthy, running sores covering his body,

(20:22):
and an atmosphere of accumulated disease, pain, and death around him,
has made his appearance in the world and devours mankind,
especially poor helpless infants. Not by sores only, or hundreds
or thousands, but by hundreds of thousands. This monster has
been named vaccination, and his progressive havoc among the human
race has been dreadful and most alarming, Yet strange to tell,

(20:44):
this monster has found not only a multitude of friends,
but worshippers who prostrate themselves before him and encourage his
voracious appetite. Do not the men, the heroes who first
dared to stand forth to arrest the progress and stop
the fatal havoc of this most dreadful and destructive monster
and it lengths, have bravely subdued and put him to
flight with all his mighty host Meriton obelisk created to

(21:06):
their fame, with their names inscribed upon it, in indelible
characters to be held in grateful remembrance through all future generations.
Do they know they're describing smallpox the disease? Yeah? Yeah,
what do they think? Smallpoxes not as bad as getting
vaccinated for small box. It's what they're doing is describing

(21:29):
it like a Satanist cult, like vaccinations. And I think
some of it comes from just the assumption that, well,
I won't get small box when it comes through town
because I'm special, because yeah, but if I if I
get the vaccine, I'll get kind of sick. Yeah. So yeah,
and so it's worse than I mean, that's so similar.
There's some art that accompanies this passage. You know, that
monster with the tail of a cow and the closet

(21:51):
teeth of the type they drew it. I gotta I'll
describe it a thank you, thank you. So it's a
what I assume as a cow, an alligator mouth and
lots of tiny colligator and then people trying to get
into Oh no, they're it's got nipples or I'm not
sure if those are nipples or so. I think there's
sores because they're they're like bleeding pus and he's so

(22:15):
people are I see what it is? Now doctors would
I assume our doctors pro vax ers with horns are
pouring babies, tiny babies into its mouth, and then it's
shifting them out. The cow creature is shifting out alligators
alligator is shifting out the babies. Yeah, it's pretty great.

(22:37):
That's a good logo. Yeah, we'll have this up on
the side behind the Bastards dot com. And since we
just had a colligator shipping dead babies, I think the
only appropriate thing to do is an ad bread. We're
back by. Those products really took the taste of that

(23:01):
sore filled colligator out of my mouth. Now it's back
in my mouth. Now it's back in your mouth. Yeah,
I mean it's just right there at that thing. I
just pretty cool, pretty cool drawing. I kind of love it,
but not for its purpose. Not for its purpose, but
you've got to appreciate a good, good, real horrifying. Yeah.
Political cartoon. Now back in the United States. Despite its

(23:22):
early head start, the anti vaccine movement was not a
significant force from most of the eighteen hundreds. After vaccinations
introduction at the start of the century, the smallpox virus
was almost eradicated in America by the eighteen twenties or so,
but it came roaring back in the eighteen seventies because
so many people stopped vaccinating themselves. Since the gender vaccine
was only good for five to seven years, regular vaccinations

(23:42):
were required in order to maintain a city's herd immunity.
And this is where things get a little muddier in
terms of blame, because the earliest American vaccine refusers kind
of had a point. Vaccination was undoubtedly worth it on
a societal level, but it caused significant human suffering. Taking
the gender vaccine still made you sick, and some people
died from it. Um It was not nearly as bad
as smallpox, but many, particularly white Americans, did not believe

(24:05):
they needed to suffer through that, since by the late
eighteen hundreds, smallpox was widely considered to be a disease
suffered from and spread by black people. One of its
many nicknames was the inWORD itch. Now, yeah, it's we're
I mean, we're talking about America in the eighteen seventies.
We're gonna be diving into some hardcore racism, some like
some like racism that David Duke would look at and

(24:26):
be like, guys, too far and that's far, that's far. Yeah. So,
when smallpox outbreaks would hit cities, large numbers of particularly
affluent Americans would often refuse vaccination. Families would also hide
their sick family members rather than turning them over to
pox houses, where they'd basically sit in a prison for
weeks and either recover or die. That's what happened when
you caught small box, and especially if you were poor.

(24:48):
Black families were particularly likely to hide their ilkin because
of course the pox houses for black people were always
poorly maintained and terrifying. Sick prisons, definitely, and you would
almost definitely die. Yeah. Early anti vaccine sentiment then was
not so much a rejection of vaccines as it was
a fear of getting sick mixed with racism and an
understandable fear of racism. But in short order, an understandable

(25:09):
impulse morphed into an ideology familiar to anyone who's listened
to Jenny McCarthy lately Here's Discover magazine. In eighteen seventy nine,
after a visit to New York by William Tebb, the
leading British anti vaccinationist, the Anti Vaccination Society of America
was founded. Subsequently, the New England Anti Compulsory Vaccination League
was formed in eighteen eighty two, and the Anti Vaccine
League of New York City in eighteen eighty five. Using pamphlets,

(25:31):
court battles and vigorous fights on the floor of state legislatures.
The anti vaccinationists succeeded in repealing compulsory vaccination laws in California, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Utah,
West Virginia, and Wisconsin. A continual battle was waged between
public health authorities and the anti vaccinationists, with the anti
vaccinationist battling vaccination in the courts and instigating riots. In

(25:51):
Montreal and Milwaukee. There was also a riot and rio
de jan era. They were like riots over vaccinations. People
like shot at each other over vaccinations. That's crazy, fighting
in the streets over vaccination, over vaccinations. Now this might
make a little bit more sense in a little while.
Um being Americans, the anti vactor has also made political cartoons.

(26:11):
Ours were not as subtle or as artistic as the
European ones. You want to describe that. Yeah, so we've
got a snake labeled vaccination just written right on the
side in big words, this is a badal. It's hissing
at a mother and her infant child. And then behind
the snake is a skeleton in all which I must

(26:35):
assume is death. And then over top it says do
not vaccinate. Now, what do you think the message of
that cartoon is I really think that it's about the economy. Yeah,
that's what I'm getting. I think it's it's about the economy,
the quality, collapse of the banking system in what I read.
That's what That's what I read from it to a

(26:56):
lot of subtleties and that giant snake with vaccination. Sorry,
that's a bad cartoon. That's not an effective cartoon. Whoever
drew that shouldn't be making them. Also, the mom has
a really shitty face, a really shitty face. Yea, yeah,
the baby looks weird. Baby looks weird. Fan of the skeleton.

(27:17):
I'm a fan of the skeleton. That's the best part.
I would love to see the world where it's just
skeletons and veils and I love I want to imagine
the editor talking to this cartoonist being like, no, the
snake with vaccination written on the side isn't clear enough. Skeleton. Yeah,
we need a skeleton up in there. I'm still not
getting it. Just put a label at the very top
with two exclamation point just to all caps. All caps.

(27:40):
By the turn of the century, the federal organization in
charge of stopping the spread of smallpox in America was
the United States Marine Hospital Service. This was a quasi
military organization, and it needed to be. Resistance to vaccination
in American cities was often violent. Starting in the late
eighteen nineties, a new strain of smallpox began racing through
communities in the American South. It was milder and less deadly,

(28:00):
which sounds like a good thing, but it was not
necessarily a good thing. Diseases that mutate into less deadly
versions can just as easily mutate into something more lethal,
so it's still just as important to eradicate infestations when
they start. However, the fact that the new smallpox killed
fewer people acted as fuel for the anti vaccine movement.
This smallpox barely kills anyone, why should we vaccinated our

(28:21):
kids against it? Uh So? The fact that this new
strand smallpox had a reputation for infecting quote none but
negroes also had another major impact. Oh god, yeah, I
can totally see how it goes. So rather than being
wiped out when it started to spread, this new smallpox
virus burnt through the Southeast like a Texas wildfire. Here's
the book Pox cuban Itch. Some called it or Puerto

(28:43):
Rico scratch, Manila scab, Filipino itch, Mexican bump inWORD itch,
Italian itch, Hungarian itch, camp itch, army itch, elephant itch,
kangaroo itch, cedar itch, bean pox, or simply bumps. Really
curious about why kangaroos came into it. Was it about

(29:03):
Australia like the outlaws in Australia, it was still the
Australians are bringing in the small box. Maybe maybe it
was directed at Indigenous people in Australia after all of
the racism and the preceding two thirds of that. The
idea that they might have just hated Australians is almost
like almost wholesome. It is almost kangaroo, which might I

(29:24):
feel like someone's going to call us out on on
that and be like no, no, no, no. Kangaroo was
a racial slur for the Portuguese O God was it
affecting like Cuba and Puerto Rico. I mean it affected everywhere.
It spread through the world like wildfire. One of the
reasons why there was this myth that black people were
more likely to get it is that particularly black minstrel

(29:47):
shows traveled a lot throughout this area, and so these
people would be traveling, and people who travel a lot
are more likely to spread diseases and stuff, So that
was like one reason, but it was also like a
lot of it was just racism, Like they would just say, well,
it must have been a black guy who brought that
is east to town just because they were racist. Yeah,
it's like how immigrants bring crime. Ya, that's what they do.

(30:09):
That's what they do. That's my parents came here and
said it's time to rob And you know, only our
doctors are immigrants. And I feel like, as a country,
if there's one thing we can lose, it's a quarter
of our doctors. Oh yeah, we're doing We're healthy. Yeah,
we're fine, we're fine, we're doing great. I do listen

(30:29):
to that, and I'm like, oh, my desire to not
get a flu shot is not too far off from
them being like it's just baby smallpox, just baby smallpox. No,
I mean we all like, that's you can see why
it spreads like these are all you know. I don't
get the flu shot as often as I ought to,
so I'm like, I won't get I trust that my
eating expired muscles and clams on a regular basis will

(30:51):
keep me safe from everything. Yeah, so far it has.
I have had I'm one of the only people you
probably meet who's had a polio in a smallpox vaccination. Oh,
because I've traveled in some places where it's like you,
you might want to get a polio vaccination has been
going down here, and the smallpox vaccination does suck. Did
you get the flu? No? No, but like your arm

(31:12):
is fucked up for a while, how long, I don't know,
like four or five days. Like it just sucks. Yeah. So,
since every white person in America was racist as funk
back then, and since smallpox was seen as a disease
spread by non white people, the most Southern communities responded
to outbreaks by restricting the mobility of their black citizens
even more often quarantining the black parts of town when

(31:33):
an outbreak started. This, of course, led to black people
hiding their sick family members from vaccination corps doctors. Racism
also meant that many communities failed to take the outbreak seriously.
In even when smallpox began raging in the black neighborhood
of Middlesboro, Kentucky, white people basically ignored the problem. At first.
The local newspaper wrote quote up to the present, no
white people have been attacked, and there is positively no

(31:54):
occasion for alarm. There was thousand something like people got
it there. It was a terrible, terrible outbreak. Unlike everyone
else back then, smallpox was not racist, and it quickly
spread through both black and white homes. So very woke illness.
That's a good lineoox, Yeah, very good line. The Marine
Hospital Service sent over doctors to contain the outbreak, since

(32:14):
local authorities had failed horribly. The city was, quote from
the book Pox, divided into five districts, one inspector to
each make a house to house canvas. A local newspaper
boasted awkwardly that the services inspection showed that quote, outside
of smallpox, this is the healthiest town on the globe.
What they examined. Everyone vaccinating the few unscarred people they found.
Anyone who refused the vaccination order was promptly turned over

(32:37):
to the city authorities, who gave the violator the option
of being vaccinated or taken to jail. This was quote
something of a moot question, because if the uncooperating person
shows jail, they are vaccinated as soon as they enter
under a law requiring all inmates of jails to be vaccinated.
My god, I kind of love that. Yeah, it's pretty great.
Many who resisted were simply handcuffed and vaccinated, literally at gunpoint.
Police would show up. No, you're got You're gonna get

(32:58):
the fucking shot right now. Which do you When infected
people were found in a home, all clothing and betting
was burnt, the house would be pumped full of sulfur
smoke in order to sterilize it. If the home was
too old and drafty to be effectively sterilized this way,
the vaccination core would just burn it down. Well, it
was like a part of this, we just gotta burn
down this whole block. Suck it. I understand a how

(33:19):
that was effective, but also be how that made people
be like, it's not like today where someone's just reading
nonsense on the internet and decide not to vaccinate their kids.
It's like, you see these people showing up at your
door with guns and cutting your arm and burning down houses,
and you don't like them. It's like down houses a lot.
I get why you might not trust these people. It's

(33:40):
not unreasonable. Yeah, I think the people burning down the
house in this case are overall in the right. I
get I get the resistance a team. McCormick was a
member of the Kentucky Board of Health. The Middlesborough outbreak
was a major black mark on his organization's name because
they basically ignored shit when it started and then failed
to provide adequate resources to fight the epidemic. In order
to say face, McCormick blamed black people, announcing that quote

(34:03):
the exemption of the white race from this mild strain
of smallpox was over and quote visiting and strange negro
should be hunted, vaccinated, and kept under observation. Again, not
all good guys on this side. So uh. During outbreaks,
local governments would force community members to provide proof of vaccination.
Failure to do so could result in fines, usually between

(34:24):
five and a hundred dollars. Short jail terms were also common,
but local judges would also force people to work on
chain gangs. In one instance in North Carolina, a vaccine
refuser who threatened to spread smallpox to his political enemies
had quote three buggy whips worn out on him, so
they were within people. Sometimes for this everything is hardcore.
In the late eighteen hundreds, nobody half asses anything. Yeah,

(34:47):
which is weird too. Because it's also the era of
like female propriety and like like just being proper in general,
and that Victorian sensibility. What side of so the is
also the area in which the feminist movement is very
first starting to come in. Which side of this do
you think they wind up on? Oh? God, okay, they were?

(35:09):
Well no, Actually, that's part of what makes this fun.
I mean, some of them were, but that's part of
what we're getting to that so well, vaccination was a
clear good and a necessary thing. Many of its major
advocates were bastards. And this is where the story gets
kind of weird because a lot of the first American
anti vaccine advocates were not idiots and kuks. Many of
them were progressives who supported women's suffrage in anti racist policies,

(35:30):
and we're reacting to the racism that was often present
in vaccination campaigns. While the first anti vax movement in
England was a working class thing, the American anti vax
movement was an affluent left wing movement. So basically, right
wing authoritarian assholes like the governments in small town southern
America were pro vaccine but also used the threat of
smallpox to further repressed black people and generally went about

(35:50):
ensuring vaccine laws were complied with in the most brutal
way possible. Meanwhile, a lot of leftists were anti vaccine,
which was insanely dangerous, But they were also reacting to
a lot of the big getry that was wrapped up
in the whole thing. It's fucking why, very complicated, it really.
Frederick Douglas, the famed abolitionist, stood against compulsory vaccination. You
believe that mandatory vaccines were an encroachment on people's freedom

(36:12):
of choice because they were like whipping, whipping people in
burning houses. Yeah, you can see why someone would be
on the other side of that. Leo Tolstoy was an
anti vaccine sympathizer, agreeing with the cause for the same
reason he agreed with quote every struggle for liberty in
any sphere of life. These were not always high minded
arguments about freedom. George Bernard Shaw called vaccination a peculiarly

(36:33):
filthy piece of witchcraft. If you're a fan of a
great author or poet or civil rights leader from the
late eighteen hundreds or early nineteen hundreds, there's a weirdly
good chance they were anti vaccine. Advocates. The book Pox
says that these people were part of a now mostly
defunct American intellectual tradition called libertarian radicalism. These folks aren't
libertarians in the sense that we're used to. Most of
what they advocated had nothing to do with economics. You know,

(36:55):
iron Ran hadn't been born yet. They were more focused
on personal freedom, which made them great on issues like
letting women vote and arguing that black people shouldn't be
murdered by cops, but made them bad on vaccination. Quote
from the book Box, the same men and women who
joined anti vaccination leagues tended to throw themselves into other
maligned causes of their era, including anti imperialism, women's rights,
anti vivisection, vegetarianism, Henry Georgie's single tax, the fight against

(37:18):
government censorship of obscene materials under the late nineteenth century
comstock laws, and opposition to state eugenics. Interesting. Yeah, it's
really complicated. Well, it's I mean, I get it because
the way it was compulsory vaccination was enforced was problematic. Yeah,
problematic even when it's like necessary, when it's like no,

(37:40):
thousands of people will die if we're not burning down
houses like forcing, and you know people's houses who got
burned down. Rich people didn't get their houses burned down.
Rich people didn't get forced at gunpoint probably. Uh. And
there were some doctors shot doing this too, Like it
was hard for ship. Like you could do a pretty
good like Showtime original series about like being a hard
boiled vaccine doctor. I don't know, but I think Woody

(38:06):
Harrelson would be a great two fisted vaccine doctor, very
good cutting fucking razor blade in one hand, cutting people's
arms and shooting others. It's great. Well, okay, if anyone's listening.
If anyone's listening, that's a hot ticket. I'll write your scripts.
I don't know how to write scripts, but but you

(38:27):
can definitely consult. I'll draw a crude picture of Woody
Harrelson being a badass vaccine doctor. It'll be great, and
it'll have similarities to the cow. It'll it's gonna look
a lot like the Calligator. Yeah, yeah, yeah, uh so. Yeah,
this is not the story that I expected. I didn't
wind up telling when I first started researching the anti

(38:47):
vaccine movement. Part of this story is that yes, we
are still very dumb and refused to use life saving
medicine for dumb reasons. But it's just more complicated than that.
The fact that being anti vax was more reasonable in
the late eight hundreds in early nineteen hundreds meant that
it was also more popular. Like I said, there were
enormous anti vaccine riots and cities around North and South
America then as today. Parents who suffered tragic losses or

(39:09):
health issues with their kids formed a crucial core of
the movement. In six Laura Little of Minneapolis lost her
seven year old son. She claimed that the smallpox vaccine
is what killed him, even though he died seven months
after being vaccinated, So it wasn't I mean, no, it
was not. But at the time, like who knows, like
you know, there's not much science back then, Like he
got seven months later, it's like he probably got sick.

(39:33):
What it was is he got sick from the vaccine
because that's what the vaccine did, and he got sick
again shortly thereafter. And I think to her it just
looked like he was sick continually after it, even though
like lady, it's eighteen ninety six, half of the kids die,
like kids just die for no reason. Yeah, he shouldn't
have named him that was a bad call speaking of

(39:55):
not naming babies. Uh Anna, are you a fan of
products and services? Um? Yeah, okay, well that's an ad pivot.
We're back products services. I'll try them. You should try them.

(40:16):
You know what else? You should try? Vaccination? Fine, I'll
get a flu shot. I won't. I mean, I keep
being like I don't work with kids anymore. I do.
If I'm going to like a family reunion and I
know I'm gonna be around old people, you do, because
well I don't want to. Don't want to just like
my old my elderly relative sick with because they could

(40:38):
die from there. I would have never even thought about that. Yeah,
Like that's the main reason. Like I don't care my
other my roommates are also early thirties, late twenties, Like
we all get each other sick once a year. It's whatever.
I don't want to get someone who could die from
the flu sick. I'm so selfish that when I was
teaching kindergarten, I got the flu shot only because I

(40:58):
was like, third can get me sick. At no point
was I like it's for them. When I taught special ed, uh,
I never got sick and I never got vaccinated just
because like you're exposed to every Like that's true. The
first six months I was sick a lot, and then
after that I was like fucking iron I had like strapped,
I was sick all the time. And then yeah, and

(41:18):
then you're just like invulnerable. Ship. The zombie plague can
hit tomorrow. I'll fight that ship off. It's like, how
do people not believe immunity by exposure is a thing
when literally, that is what happens in life. Yeah, that's
why teachers are are so terrifying and powerful. That's why

(41:39):
that's why I don't funk with them. So yeah. Laura
Little of Minneapolis lost her her little kid, uh, and
then became a major anti vaccine advocate. She became the
editor of a magazine called The Liberator, an early anti
vax pro fringe medicine magazine basically the Natural News of
its day. Now you may also recognize there was an
earlier Liberator and the abolitionist era before the Civil War.

(41:59):
It was an abolitionist newspaper. She named her anti vaccine
newspaper The Liberator because she saw anti vaccination advocacy as
part of the same intellectual tradition as abolitionism, and it
kind of was the same, a lot of the same people,
Like there were a lot of the older people in
the active vaccine movement pre Civil War had been abolitionists.
I guess it's tough now, Yeah, it's getting tough. It's complicated,

(42:23):
it's really complicated because these are not bad people. They're
wrong about this, but they're like in eight six being like,
ladies should vote. Racism is bad. No one else is
saying that. Yeah, but they're also saying the smallpox vaccine
is the devil. It's out of step with how science works.
But again, science wasn't great at this point. Still even still,

(42:45):
that's right. Yeah. So Laura did work in The Liberator
that did virgin real journalism. She interviewed the parents of
children who died as a result of vaccination has gone
wrong and kids did die as a result. Eighteen nineties
was not nearly as good as it is now. The
error rate was a lot higher. One of her was
titled Crimes of the cow Pox Ring Some moving pictures
thrown on the dead wall of official silence, solid title.

(43:07):
Anti vaccine advocates had other tactics besides rioting. Many of
them would protect their kids by giving them fake vaccination scars,
or if they couldn't stop their kids from being vaccinated,
they would attempt to scrub the vaccine out of the
arm after it was inserted. I'm sorry, both those things
are horrible, horrible. Now, it would probably be unfair to
call the people who did that anti vaxers. They were
anti their kids getting vaccinated because they didn't want their

(43:29):
kid to get sick. But the anti vaccine movement as
an ideological movement was a very different thing, and it
was more wrapped up in like freedom of choice and
resistance to racism in that sort of him So it's wonky.
Many early anti vaxxers were doctors, or at least doctors
doing the hand quote sign, because again, the late eighteen
hundreds and early nineteen hundreds was the period in which

(43:50):
medicine was starting to become real. Up until that point,
to most Americans, a doctor of homeopathy was probably just
as credible as a Stanford surgeon. Most medicine was just
whiskey and hands at this point. So people were not
nearly as dumb as they are today for distrusting medical science.
Were they letting blood? Oh yeah, all the time, and
you know that's not always pretty to do, but like,

(44:10):
like this is the point where anyone can call themselves
a doctor. In the medical community was just starting to
figure out, Okay, well some of us are actually doctors,
and some of us are charlatan's, and like a lot
of the charlatan's wound up on the anti vaccine side
of things because they were pro natural medicine or whatever. Yeah,
that's interesting. I mean, I think it's echoed today in
how we trust doctors and how younger doctors are using

(44:34):
newer technology and newer strategies, but the older doctors aren't
always doing the medes. Now, there was a lot of
reason to distrust the credible doctors and mainstream medical science
at this point. One thing that would have been in
living memory from any of the people doing this was
during the Civil War, Robert E. Lee's army, the Army

(44:55):
of Northern Virginia had five thousand men rendered combat ineffective
before the battle Chancellor's Bill because when they've been vaccinated,
the doctor had accidentally used part of a syphilis or
in order to make the vaccine. Oh my god, So
they all got yeah, that's true. That does feel like
that does feel like karma. Wow, that's crazy. That is

(45:22):
crazy that doctor gets like stone today he would hope,
so right, like even though like that's a pretty big
oh yeah, maybe he was like a that's the movie
or the show that that's the show. Like a doctor
like infecting the Confederate army with syphilis. That's such a
smart that's a really smart because that five thousand men,

(45:43):
that's like a fucking that's like half a division or
something like that. That's a lot of combat strength lost. Yeah,
pretty cool, pretty cool. But for the people in this
era is a like that that would have been a
famous example of like, well, you can't trust these doctors.
I don't want my kid getting syphilis, right that actually
that did happen. So you've got all these doctors who
are chiropractors and homeopaths, and they are basically fighting a

(46:05):
war within the medical establishment with what we know today
is real doctors. But we're at that time not a
whole lot more credible. You know. The vice president of
the Anti Vaccination Society of America was what was known
as a botanical physician. He prefers to use natural, plant
based medicine rather than pharmaceutical drugs, and you know, mercury. Uh.
This guy, Dr Climber wrote a tract called Vaccination Brought

(46:27):
Home to You. His sources were mainstream medical textbooks which
talked extensively about the very real side effects of that
error's vaccines. So he's basically taking books written by his
professional rifles and cherry picking the evidence that made them
look bad to an uneducated mass. Another made yeah, well
smart not not a bad strategy. Another major anti vaccine

(46:47):
advocate was Dr J. W. Hodge, a homeopath in Niagara Falls,
and one speech in nineteen o two, he stated, compulsory
vaccination ranks with human slavery and religious persecution is one
of the most flagrant outrages upon the rights of the
human race. So these physicians and laymen and lame women
anti vactor's blanketed the nation and pamphlets and books outlining
their case against vaccination. According to the book Pox Quote,

(47:10):
violent imagery pervaded the anti vaccination texts. The frontist piece
of Climber's book pictured a police officer armed with a
copy of the vaccination law seizing a baby from its
mother's lap while the angel of death waited with open arms.
Laura Little found material enough in the public record quote.
It is for this hellish work that churches, theaters, and
business blocks and whole neighborhoods have been rated, she wrote.

(47:30):
Ocean liners populations cow poxed, a shipload of Negro laborers,
driven off the vessel with clubs at Panama and poisoned
in spite of resistance. Arrests have been made, in innocent
persons cast into jail and they're jabbed with the virus.
And most atrocious of all, the annual army of babies
graduating from nursery into school are required to bear their
little arms and receive this injection of disease from middle

(47:51):
class anti vaccinationists. The plight of the working class vaccine refusers,
pinioned by police officers and vaccinated revealed the tyranny and
despotism of the entire system of state medicine. If this
can be done and upheld by the legal machinery of
the state, what next have we do, expect, asked climber.
Why not chase people and circumcise them. It surely would
be a good preventative against certain kinds of disease. Why

(48:12):
not catch the people and give each a compulsory bath.
So again, this is not even when the cooks are
bringing up this is not These are some real questions
to ask. That's the first time in society a dealt
with this like what it is a valid question, and
I I see how compulsory vaccination in its form spurred
that question individual rights. It did. Now, the anti vaccine

(48:34):
movement saw an enormous success for a time. By the
early nineteen hundreds, the US was known as the least
vaccinated of any quote civilized country means the white country.
And however high minded their arguments, lack of vaccination was
just as likely to cause deadly outbreaks then as it
is now. In March of nineteen hundred, the town of Jonesville, Mississippi,
was hit by an especially brutal variant of the smallpox virus.

(48:57):
Seventy of the people who caught this box died from it,
and since vaccination rates were so low in Jonesville, it
was not uncommon for whole families to be wiped out,
just found dead in their homes, entire family lines. So
this again, most of what's hitting in this period is
the less deadly version of smallpox, but every now and
then you have one of these murder variants creep up.
Which is why it's so important to vaccinate people. Yeah,

(49:19):
and this is why the doctors who are burning down
houses are like, no, I really need to be burning
down houses and like forcing people at gunpoint to do this.
That's interesting. It seems like there is this push and
pull at least up until this point of like once
people start to forget how deadly the virus is, yeah,
they don't need vaccination. And that's when I think comes

(49:39):
back and Jonesville, Mississippi, gets wiped out. Yeah. Now Utah
and it's largely Mormon citizenry, were eager converts to the
anti vaccine cause. They also had a nightmarish smallpox outbreak
in nineteen hundred. Three thousand people caught the disease, twenty
six of them diet that was fortunately one of the
less deadly variants of it. In nineteen or three, a
group of Michigan anti vaxers led by Laura Little had

(50:00):
a Brexit level legislative surprise victory when they passed a
build and made it legal to compel any child to
get vaccinated or require vaccination to let a child into school.
The states doctors were outraged and succeeded in getting the
bill amended to allow them to at least force vaccinations
during an outbreak. As you'd expect, the anti vaccine victory
in Michigan was followed three years later by a nightmare
smallpox epidemic. Twenty eight thousand people got sick. WHOA, that's

(50:23):
so much again. I'm not going to say Laura Little
is a bad person, but she got twenty eight thousand
people sick with smallpox. Yeah, for good reason. She wasn't
a fun You get a lot of credit for me
if you're not racist in nineteen o three and you're
a white lady, like, yeah, that's not She was woke
by their standards. Yeah, she thought it was bad to

(50:44):
like force black people off of boats and reject them
with drugs against their will, which most people would have
been liable. They don't have a right to say no. Yeah. Yeah,
Oh gosh, this is so tangled about. It's really tangled
up anti vaccine advocates. Whereas you might expect pretty likely
to die of smallpox, putting him j Ramsdell of Cambridge,
Massachusetts was a prominent Christian scientist and anti vaxer. When

(51:07):
he died in nineteen o two, the New York Times
reported that he had quote died of the disease. He defied, Wow,
I love that. Here's pox in Charlotte, North Carolina. Five
vaccine refusers died of the disease later that year. In
June three, on the very same day that the Minnesota
legislature enacted the anti compulsion VAX law he had championed,
the Minneapolis anti vaccination ist Charles Stevens died of smallpox

(51:29):
at his home. These people are often like dying while
they're advocating against the vaccine. This is like when people
are against public funded healthcare. Yeah, it's like, yeah, just
wait till you get canceled. Just wait till you can yeah,
or wait till your fucking barista spreads a deadly disease
to you because they couldn't afford to take the day

(51:49):
off of work because they don't get sick. Yeah it's coming, okay.
So the most interesting side of this to me is
the sort of conflict betwe in all these pro and
anti vaccine doctors. This battle came to a head in
the story of doctor Samuel Durkin. He was a lecturer
at Harvard and chairman of the Boston Board of Health.
He was a real doctor. Now, Massachusetts was at this

(52:11):
time going through its worst smallpox outbreak in generations, and Durgan,
as a young man, had lived in an outbreak that
had killed like a thousand people, so he was like,
hated smallpox. Okay, well, I mean that seems like it's
what it takes. Yeah, it's hundreds of people died. YEA
one causal factor was that in eighteen ninety four, anti
vaccine advocates that secured their equivalent to the conscience and

(52:32):
Subject or exemption, allowing parents to secure a doctor's note
saying their child was unfit for vaccination. Since there were
plenty of anti VAXX doctors, any parent could find a
physician willing to exempt their kid. So, while this epidemic
was infecting hundreds of people and spreading into Boston, a
newsletter started going around town advising parents to exempt their
children from vaccination, stating quote, there are hundreds of physicians

(52:53):
in Massachusetts who are well aware of the uselessness and
evil effects of vaccination. When The Boston Globe reached out
to Dr Durgan about this newsletter, he issued a challenge, quote,
if there are among the adult and leading members of
the anti vaccinationists who would like an opportunity to show
the people their sincerity and what they profess. I will
make arrangements by which that belief may be tested. In

(53:13):
the effect of such an exhibition of faith by exposer
to smallpox without vaccination be made clear. So he's like,
come at me, anti vax doctors, Well, we'll take you
to a smallpox ward and like, see if your methods
of avoiding smallpox work better than well their method is,
I'll never go there. Well no, I mean their method
They had all these kookie things about like no, no,

(53:33):
you just gotta exercise and the vegetables and stuff like.
The doctors aren't like people like people like Laura Little
are ideologically being like this, it's wrong to force vaccines.
A lot of these doctors are being like no, no, no,
homeopathy will keep you safe. Right, listen to me. My
profession is my professions right. So Dark and straight up

(53:54):
hated the anti vaccine movement, and he particularly reviled the
men who called themselves doctors. Among that crowd, he called
anti vaxers quote a class of men whose minds are
so curiously constituted that they will select for study the
nether side of the social fabric, the weakness of the
best of governments, and the minor defects in the character
of the world's heroes. Emmanuel Phifer was one of these doctors.

(54:15):
He was a major advocate of Kouk medicine as well
as an anti vaxer. Back in April of that year,
he'd argued in court that the state should not interfere
with quote any cosmopath, clairvoyant, hypnotist, magnetic healer, mind curist,
messur osteopath, or Christian scientist. Phifer was yeah, shots fired,
don't know what a cosmopath is, but real excited about

(54:36):
that word. Someone who believes your diseases come from the
stars and the that's what we're going to choose to
go with. Yeah. Now. Phifer was a registered physician who
believed he could here quote all kinds of chronic diseases
just by simple laying on of hands. He was what
he was, a health nut and believe that good diet,

(54:56):
proper exercise, and moral behavior were enough to protect you
from a disease like smallpox. In nineteen o two, he
took Dr Durgan up on his offer and went to
visit the Smallpox Board on Gallops Island. Less than two
weeks later, Dr Phifer disappeared. Suddenly, this very public man
who had abandoned his practice and dropped off the face
of the earth. Dr Durgan launched a five day man

(55:17):
hunt to find him, which eventually revealed that he had
gotten tremendously ill from smallpox and was dying in a farmhouse.
So what happened after this is what I'm gonna tell you.
When they found him, the Board of Health announced that
he probably would not survive. Here's pox quote. How many
had been exposed to smallpox in these days. Between Fifer's
disappearance and the arrival of the health officials at his

(55:38):
Bedford bedside, no one knew. Bedford officials placed the Fifer
farm under quarantine, ordering all on the premises vaccinated. Learning
that Fiffer's two daughters had been to school since his arrival,
officials ordered all the town's pupils to get vaccinated or
stay home. Boston authorities tracked down two carriages in which
Fifer had traveled and disinfected them. All of the residents
of the Charlestown apartment house were vaccinated, to everyone's surprise,

(55:59):
except perhaps his own. Emmanuel Phifer's famous constitution pulled him
back from the brink of death, and he began his
long recovery. The race for the moral high ground began.
Even before his survival was assured. Durgan announced that several
other physicians had visited Gallops Island that season, and, having
previously been vaccinated, none came down with smallpox. Now a
lot of people attacked Durgan after this, and we're like, dude,
you just gave a guy smallpox and he went wandering

(56:21):
around the world and infected a bunch of people. That's
not good medicine. Which is a fair point. That's a
fair point. But I can see both sides latching onto
a different read of what happened, and they sure as
ship did. Dr Phifer's anti vaccine sentiments did not change,
and in fact, he used this the fact that he
had survived, as proof that he was right all along,

(56:43):
even though he got horribly ill and very nearly died. Uh,
nobody changes their minds based on evidence, Anna, No, that's true. Yeah,
but the United States at least drifted further and further
away from supporting quack medicine after this point. Roughly a
year after this, another Massachusetts man, Pastor Jacobson, would be
charged with refusing a mandatory vaccine during an outbreak. He
was taken to court, convicted, and found guilty of the

(57:05):
crime of refusing vaccination. Jacobson appealed in this case eventually
made its way up to the Supreme Court. When they
ruled on Jacobson v. Massachusetts in nineteen o five, the
ability of the government to compel vaccinations, even with the
use of police force was uppelled. This decision, along with
the fact that vaccines grew more effective and less terrible
over the next few decades, lead to the gradual extinction
of the American anti vax movement, at least for a while. Now.

(57:28):
There's a really fucked up code to this, because when
eugenics became a thing, which starts right after this point
nineteen teens and twenties, is when the American eugenics movement
starts sterilizing tens of thousand people. And when I guess
what their main legal cited precedent is compulsory compulsory vaccination.
If we can vaccinate people to stop the spread of sickness,

(57:49):
why can't we sterilize people to stop the spread of sickness?
So again all of this is tangled up so as
compulsory anything is like you're on a slippery slope and
you don't always a slippery slope does not always mean things.
Because we have compulsory vaccination today and we don't sterilize

(58:10):
people for no good reasons today it does. It's just
like how you know, but you can opt out today
also some places some places you can't, and that that
may be changing with with all the out breaks that
have happened. It's sort of like how um when you
Listee Simpson grant past the Anti KKK Act that like
allowed the government to arrest people for essentially what were
their political opinions. It could have gone on a slippery

(58:33):
slope and like led to an authoritarian regime, but instead
of just led to a bunch of clansmen getting jailed.
So fine, we don't always go down the slippery slope.
Sometimes you just have to be very careful with the
actions you're taking. Measured, measured, and uh yeah, So that
was a morally complicated and confusing episode. Next episode, which
will be running tomorrow for you, we're going to talk

(58:54):
about something that's not morally confusing, and we will be
talking about a real bastard, a guy named Andrew Wakefield
looking forward to getting a little bit less ambiguity. Yeah,
I didn't know which side to take. There's no side
to take. It's just an important story. If you're gonna
we're really getting behind the bastards here, Yes, truly, this
is the behind the behind. Yeah, this was really far behind.

(59:16):
Tomorrow next episode we'll just be talking about a bastard.
So yeah, all right, that's the episode. What do I
do at the end of an evo? Oh god, oh god, panic, panic,
panic and plugables. You can check my web comic out
on Instagram. It's bad Comics with an X. Buy on
a two ends and that's also my handle on Twitter.
Followed me on the social media's and uh, if you

(59:41):
have a interpretation of that coming tune that we saw
and described, uh, tell us about it. Yeah, please do.
It'll be up on our website, Behind the Bastards dot com.
You can find us on social media and uh, you
know Twitter. In the Graham at at Bastards pot the
kids call it the Graham And I didn't know if
here I didn't pick at whoa that's even faster? Yeah,

(01:00:03):
what about just g oh find us on the g
at at Bastards pod. You can find me on Twitter
at I right, okay, and nowhere else because Instagram frightens
and confuses me. No, I see your comics on your Twitter.
I occasionally post on you tweet some comics. Um, you
can also buy a shirt. Uh. You can buy cups,

(01:00:27):
you can buy stickers. You can buy smallpox vaccines from
behind the Bastard shop on t public dot com. They're
less vaccines and more smallpox infected T shirts, but they
work probably the same way. Um, I probably shouldn't say
that our shirts have smallpox. Well just delete this part. No,
you can't edit audio. Anna, Oh this is going in

(01:00:50):
but I already ordered six T shirts. Well, just make
sure you give them to people who spend a lot
of time around cows. They'll probably be fine. Yeah, milk
means milkmaids. All right, that's the end of the show.
Go home, do something else. I love you, goodbye. H

(01:01:11):
m hm