By Peter McKenzie-Brown and Steve Pitt
In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Friar John had just one job. While out on his clerical rounds, he was asked by a fellow Franciscan to drop off a seemingly innocent note to a brooding rich kid named Romeo Montague.
Before delivering the note, Friar John visited parishioners who were rumoured to be unwell. Unfortunately, the city of Verona was locked in plague hysteria. Veronese authorities forcibly slammed the door shut and Friar John was quarantined with his parishioners. Because the note went undelivered, Romeo mistakenly believed his teen bride Juliet had committed suicide. Rushing to her tomb, he killed himself with poison. Juliet famously awoke from a potion-induced death coma and, when she saw her Romeo’s body, killed herself with his dueling dagger.
When Shakespeare wrote this play in 1597, he suggested to his audience that astrology had somehow led to the fates of these “star-crossed” lovers.
If this tragedy occurred today, there would still be debate. One side would be complaining that two innocent teens had died needlessly because of the despotic power overreach by the medical authorities of Verona. The other side would insist that hundreds and possibly thousands of innocents lived because the authorities had prevented Father John from wandering the town after contacting people carrying the dreaded Black Death.
When did pandemics go from being a medical emergency to a political debate? In Shakespeare’s day, there was no effective way of preventing the spread of plagues other than quarantining the living and mass burials when that failed.
Two centuries later, a new era dawned. We might call it The Age of Jabs and Hesitancy. In 1796, British physician Edward Jenner introduced a medical breakthrough called vaccination. His process was a scientific improvement on an existing treatment for smallpox – a deadly, disfiguring disease ravaging every corner of the world.
Up until then, a process called variolation was the only known preventive treatment. It involved cutting open a patient’s skin and inserting powdered scab matter from a person who had recently recovered from smallpox. The process saved lives but was risky and only marginally effective: two of King George III’s children died even after being treated by variolation.
Jenner correctly conjectured that injecting material from a non-lethal but similar disease would be safer, and injecting fresh material from a living donor instead of a dried scab would be more effective. He tested his hypothesis on an eight-year-old boy by first inoculating him with a cowpox vaccine made from a cow udder. After a few weeks, he deliberately inoculated the boy with smallpox. Thankfully, the child survived.
Questionable medical ethics aside, the experiment was encouraging enough for Jenner to vaccinate more patients. After their treatment proved successful, he shared his breakthrough by publishing his findings. Since those heady days, vaccinations have saved millions around the world. But soon after the Age of Jabs began, the Anti-Jabber movements began.
You can hardly blame people for being suspicious of miracle medical cures in Jenner’s age. Real scientific medicine wasn’t even in its infancy; it was embryonic. Medical doctors were trained in traditions and theories that dated back to Greco-Roman times. Accepted medical treatments included bleeding patients; raising huge blisters all over their bodies with arsenic compounds and then lancing them; force-feeding patients with vomit- or diarrhea-inducing drugs; and prescribing pills made from mercury or other deadly substances.
When Jenner’s experiments were first published, editorial cartoons showed patients sprouting cow heads or horns from their bodies after being vaccinated. But the proof was in the results. The British conducted mass vaccinations in British India and Ceylon in the early 1800s – another morally questionable medical experiment. Fortunately, it was a success.
Spain conducted similar experiments in its American colonies. Again, success. Napoleon reputedly stated that he might as well fight a major battle every month of the year because he lost just as many soldiers to disease over the same period. Bonaparte ordered his entire army to be vaccinated. He was so pleased with the results he awarded Jenner (citizen of an enemy nation) a medal.
As the Industrial Revolution spread through Britain, so did pandemics. People left rural life for dense and dirty urban communities. In the 1830s, yet another deadly outbreak of smallpox finally prompted the British government to proclaim the first Vaccination Act in 1840. Vaccinations were free and non-mandatory.
The vaccine’s success in preventing deaths convinced the government to pass a mandatory Vaccination Act in 1853. Every newborn in Britain was required to have an anti-smallpox vaccination within three months of birth. Parents failing to comply were fined one pound sterling – a heavy fine for the working class. (Rich and middle-class citizens who did not want their children to be vaccinated could simply pay a fine).
This heavy-handed government mandate collided with a rising wave of people’s rights movements across Europe. In 1848, working class people from Italy to Ireland, Spain to Germany, marched through their streets demanding more say in government decisions, the right to free speech and control of their own destinies – including the right to decide what happened to their own children.
Part of the reason for rising resistance to jabs was the fact that the smallpox vaccine was far from foolproof. Parents who had dutifully obeyed the mandate were sometimes dismayed to see their children die anyway – sometimes from more horrible symptoms than those common in smallpox. They blamed the vaccine – not malnourishment, overcrowding and the unsanitary living conditions common in mid-19th century Europe. Also, at that time medical practices like sterilizing medical instruments and washing hands between patients weren’t standard.
In addition, respected scientists, doctors, and celebrities were among those who publically declared their opposition to vaccination mandates. Not even Dr. Jenner knew exactly how or why vaccines worked. Until brilliant scientists like Louis Pasteur unlocked the secrets of microbiology, no one knew scientifically how they worked: They just did.
Anti-vax organizations arose across Europe and North America. By 1898 there was enough well-organized resistance that the British government finally created an exemption for “conscientious objectors” to refuse vaccinations for themselves and their children. Anti-vaxers had to sign a legal document acknowledging that they knew there could be consequences for failing to have their children vaccinated, and to take responsibility for the consequences.
Such clauses lingered through the 20th century. As modern medicine and general living conditions improved, adverse consequences from vaccinations almost disappeared. World War I saw the rise of the Spanish Flu – a disease passed down the trenches, which eventually killed more than the war itself. Vaccinations arose, and by the end of World War II mass vaccinations were routine in North America, Europe, and many other regions. Childhood diseases like measles, rubella and polio lingered only where inhabitants were unable or unwilling to get vaccinated.
Even as medicine made giant leaps, government and pharmaceutical scandals around the world kept the scepticism of Anti-Jabbers alive. The same generation that can remember polio can likely also remember the Thalidomide scandal. This ill-tested morning sickness medication induced severe birth defects among thousands of babies. Also, during the last century, governments funded and participated in such medical programs as eugenics, forced sterilization, lobotomies and testing hallucinogenic drugs on institutionalized or non-European people. We have plenty to be skeptical about.
But the medical science is clear: vaccines do not make us sterile or magnetic, rewrite our DNA, contain microchips, or make certain parts of the male body swell up like basket balls. Indeed, many of us are here today because of ancestors who rolled up their sleeves.
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