NB: One more piece crossposted at Inverse Square.
I will be bringing most of what I write there over here, but if you want to make sure you see what will most often be thoughts, stories, and howls of rage in the general vicinity of my upcoming book, consider subscribing. For the foreseeable future nothing will be behind a paywall so doing so just gets you emails whenever something new shows up there.
With that…here’s a little polemical history for your Saturday afternoon.
————————–
As I’ve dived into the history of anti-vaccine ideas over the last year, a question I get asked over and over again (and have asked myself, for that matter) is “why?”
Why do people who should know better—who can know better—go all in on repeatedly-exposed-as-false claims about the dangers and ineffectiveness of vaccines?
There’s one obvious possibility. Take Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (please!). He was not always an anti-vaxxer. His big turn in that direction came in 2015, following a decades-long career as an environmental lawyer, and by no later than 2021 he was raking in genuinely big bucks, as New York Times reporter Susanne Craig documented during RFK Jr.’s short lived presidential campaign. In that piece he admitted that one of the motivations for taking that stance was the money he could get from doing so: “I had these big bills that I just couldn’t pay” he told Craig, until he without supplementing his income by acting as an anti-vaccine hired gun.
Money does talk, and without saying for a moment that the possibility of getting rich off vaccine fear-mongering could possibly color the views of any of the top social media vaccination opponents, ever wilder claims of vaccine harms have proved effective in attracting views, followers, and all the monetization opportunities that attend such success.
But even were money not a primary motivator, the deep history of vaccine rejection suggests another way in which that stance can be used to achieve goals that have nothing to do with vaccination itself.
So let’s set the WABAC machine* to take us to Boston, Massachusetts in the summer of 1721. It’s not a great time in the nascent Hub of the Universe. A smallpox flare that began in April with just a handful of cases has leapt its initial foothold along the docks, until by June it grew into a full-blown epidemic, one that would by year’s-end infect more than half of the city’s population.
This outbreak is mostly remembered for how a most unlikely person tried to stop it in its tracks. Cotton Mather, most famously the God-drunk Puritan minister who helped sustain the Salem witch scare…
…was also, it turns out, a medical innovator. Years before the 1721 return of smallpox to Boston, he’d learned from his slave Onesimus, born in Africa, of a way to stop a smallpox infection in its tracks. Onesimus told Mather what had been done to him as a child: a practitioner had taken material from the sores of someone with an active case of smallpox; scratched some deep scrapes into his limbs; and mixed the smallpox guck into those cuts. Onesimus described coming down with mild smallpox symptoms and was, he told Mather, protected ever after from a repeat bout with the disease.**
When smallpox returned to Boston more than a decade later, Mather resolved to put what he’d learned from Onesimus into practice. He recruited a local surgeon to perform the operation, and by the epidemic’s end the two men managed to persuade almost 300 people to try out the procedure.
The technique worked, as a series of repeat experiments would demonstrate over the rest of the eighteenth century. But it didn’t save Boston, not then: almost 6,000 people came down with smallpox that year. One in seven of them died. Why do so many of them reject an intervention that could have saved their lives?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is that Mather and his medical partner faced vehement, occasionally violent opposition from the local medical and civic leaders. Their objections were often couched in piety: Mather was interfering with God’s plan by deciding who should get sick (with the reaction to the vaccine) and at the same time by attempting to overrule God’s judgement over who should live and who should die.
But there was another agenda behind that indictment. The loudest clamor against Mather and those of his fellow ministers who supported this proto-vaccination came from the New England Courant, edited by James Franklin, aided by his apprentice and younger brother, Ben. James (most likely) denounced Mather in the Courant throughout the summer and autumn in a series of unsigned articles and he provided a venue for local doctors who dismissively rejected the idea of a mere minister trespassing on matters of medical science.
That rejection of the authority of a religious leader was the key. The subtext to the attacks on Mather was the question of who should govern Boston and Massachusetts: the Puritan clerical elite who had exerted authority throughout the colony since the early 17th century, or those of more worldly power and expertise—doctors and merchants and the like.
Both Franklins supported that secular challenge to the idea of a handful of men claiming divine sanction for their power. And though that battle continued for quite a while (some might say it isn’t over yet), Boston’s 1721 smallpox invasion proved to be a milestone in that struggle. Mather had been right about variolation, but it took acceptance in the coming years by the same doctors who had dismissed him then to turn inoculation into standard medical procedure. Authority, who got to say what was in and what was out, was changing hands.
Now to my point (I promise I do have one). What’s been happening with vaccines over the last decade or so? Looking just at RFK Jr.’s career and it becomes clear that the argument he’s made more than any other is that experts aren’t expert; they don’t know more than you or I, and everything they say has to be understood through a lens of self-interest, corruption, or, more charitably, as merely conventional and suspect “wisdom.”
Instead, as Kennedy and his allies have urged, anyone can do their own research, and when you do, they say, the true horrors of vaccination become clear.
That’s bullshit, of course, but to channel the wickedly funny Firesign Theatre, it’s really GREAT shit.*** Which is to say that it has been extraordinarily effective in changing the landscape of authority in the United States (and around the world).
In practice, each mote of trust that could be extracted from established authorities—like doctors or biomedical researchers who actually know stuff about infectious disease—becomes a particle of power available to those who claim they represent the democratic alternative to a closed elite serving its own interests.
So…to the question that got this post going, why does Kennedy say stuff he knows (or once knew; he may genuinely be high on his own supply by now) to be false?
Look where it’s got him: he’s the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. His equally knowing or should-be-knowledgeable co-conspirators run the CDC and the NIH and more.
All that sway has flowed to them directly because of how they were able to erode the legitimacy of traditional expertise.
All of which is to say (again!) that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it damn sure knows the chords. Mather’s opponents were wrong on the matter at hand: variolation could have saved hundreds of lives that did not need to be lost in Boston in 1721. But they won the longer campaign, eroding Puritan authority while advancing their own.
Kennedy et al. have achieved a version of the same victory. They are completely, dangerously, already fatally wrong about vaccines but for now they have pushed scientific expertise out of the federal medical policy making and have commandeered that decisive power for themselves.
TL:DR—Kennedy, his associates, and the Republican Party that has elevated them, have done so for entirely rational ends. They’ve got what they wanted—a substantially unchecked hold on the levers of government. Those who suffer and die as trust in vaccines evaporates are the collateral damage those who’ve won this round are willing to accept.
And those same victims are who we need to defend, every damn day.
Open thread.
*Yes, I am that old. Mr. Peabody is one of my heroes. ;-)
**For more on the Mather story, you can take a look at my recent book on the history of germ theory, So Very Small, or wait until this coming May for another take on it in A Pox on Fools.
***Originally said by Mrs. Presky (Phil Proctor) in response to her game show prize on the Firesign Theatre classic Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers.
Image, Frans Francken the Younger, Witches’ Sabbath, 1606
_-_Witches%27_Sabbath.jpg){kind=link}
Cotton Mather, Ben Franklin’s Brother, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Post + Comments (71)