Misplaced concerns about vaccination are not new: Malcolm Elliott tastes the medicine

‘Posters appeared of men and women with horns growing out of their heads.’

Talk of vaccination against the coronavirus leads one to think of earlier campaigns to immunise against smallpox. The word ‘vaccinate’ comes of course from the French for ‘cow’, and it was used to distinguish Edward Jenner’s method from that popularised by Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador to Turkey. She had suffered from smallpox herself, and knew how much women, especially, feared the disease as disfiguring survivors, almost as much as they feared the risk of mortality. She had witnessed inoculation by old women who injected minute quantities of pus into human veins. So impressed was Montagu that she wrote of her determination to spread the method on her return to England.

She was as good as her word and the practice became widespread in the mid-eighteenth century. Whole villages were immunised by what became known as the Suttonian method. But Jenner’s observation that the milkmaids rarely suffered from smallpox led him to speculate on the efficacy of infection from cowpox. His experiments were successful and soon became accepted, but popular antagonism was also widespread. Posters appeared of men and women with horns growing out of their heads, and, as vaccination spread, so did opposition among believers in holistic medicine and religious groups opposed to interference in the human body.

Immunisation was officially prohibited from 1841 in favour of vaccination, and, by 1867, the latter was enforced by act of Parliament.

Local opposition was widespread, but particularly strong in the midland town of Leicester, where the National Anti -Vaccination League had its headquarters. The leader of the opposition dubbed vaccination as ‘blood polluting quackery’. Much publicity was given to the wife of a local doctor who refused to have her children vaccinated and who went to prison as a result. Her incarceration only lasted a couple of hours, but the movement had its martyr, and by the end of the century many of the leading persons of the town were either fined or imprisoned for their views.
It was to accommodate this widespread opposition to vaccination that the first statutory recognition of ‘conscientious objection’ was enacted in 1899.

One wonders how refusal to accept vaccination against the coronavirus will be received. Will it be regarded as a sincere moral stand against forcible interference in God’s creation? Catholic objections seem to focus on the use of cells from a human foetus. Or will it be seen as simply Luddite opposition to progress, obstinate ignorance or moral conviction? And if the latter, how can we prevent it becoming a moral crusade?

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Comments

Malcolm Elliot appears to frame his response to ‘anti-vaxxers’ in terms of the individual. However, no matter how much we like to think we are, we are not autonomous individuals, but rather members of a society and fluttery dependent on one another, and moreover, as Quakers, members of a community. Our morality should not be framed in terms of an individual calculus of consequential good or harm or reasoned utilitarian balance, but in terms of our relationships.
I for one will have the vaccine, and accept any associated risk, because I am in a community with people I love, some of whom are much older and more vulnerable than I am, but more than that, in a society where my actions in whatever situation have an impact far further than I can possibly foresee.
This has lead me to the position where, since last March I have been far more frightened, as a relatively low risk individual (though as a 66 year old male, still not getting away with it for free), of inadvertently passing the virus on than I have been of contracting the virus myself. To an outside observer, my actions will look more or less identical in either case, but my motivation could not be more different.

By GordonF on 13th December 2020 - 20:08

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