Almost imme­di­ate­ly after Scot­tish doc­tor Edward Jen­ner learned how to inoc­u­late humans against small­pox in 1796, mass move­ments sprang up in Eng­land and the U.S. to oppose the mea­sure. The rejec­tion of inoc­u­la­tion and vac­ci­na­tion gen­er­al­ly made its stand on “polit­i­cal grounds,” says Yale his­to­ri­an Frank Snow­den. For over two hun­dred years, peo­ple have “wide­ly con­sid­ered [vac­cines to be] anoth­er form of tyran­ny.” In the 19th cen­tu­ry, fears of gov­ern­ment con­trol mutat­ed into pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries claim­ing the small­pox vac­cine might cause, for exam­ple, the growth of hooves and horns or the birth of human/cow hybrid babies.

The push­back against the small­pox vac­cine, writes Slate’s Nick Kep­pler, occurred dur­ing a time “when argu­ments about bod­i­ly integri­ty and reli­gious objec­tion car­ried as much weight as sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence.” But vac­cine sci­ence pro­gressed nonethe­less, and sci­en­tif­ic insti­tu­tions – very much in league with gov­ern­ment by the mid-20th cen­tu­ry – shared their largesse in the form of med­ical break­throughs and con­sumer con­ve­niences. “The post­war era was a very trust-in-sci­ence-era,” says researcher sci­en­tist Jonathan M. Berman, author of Anti-Vaxxers: How to Chal­lenge a Mis­in­formed Move­ment. “The pub­lic not just accept­ed, but cheered, the head­line-mak­ing work of guys in white lab coats,” Kep­pler remarks.

Not every­one was cheer­ing for Jonas Salk, the March of Dimes, and the polio vac­cine, how­ev­er. While celebri­ties like Elvis Pres­ley legit­imized the vac­cine in the eyes of a pre­vi­ous­ly skep­ti­cal pub­lic, a few fer­vent anti-vaxxers rose to promi­nence, some using the same com­bi­na­tion of fear mon­ger­ing, pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic spec­u­la­tion, and con­spir­a­to­r­i­al think­ing com­mon to the small­pox era – and com­mon, once again, in the time of COVID-19.

One of these fig­ures, Flori­da busi­ness­man Duon Miller, found­ed a cos­met­ics com­pa­ny, then invest­ed his own mon­ey and that of oth­ers into an orga­ni­za­tion called Polio Pre­ven­tion Inc., a one-man oper­a­tion that pur­port­ed to fight polio with infor­ma­tion about nutri­tion. Miller’s orga­ni­za­tion actu­al­ly served to under­mine the vac­cine with a host of out­ra­geous, log­i­cal­ly fal­la­cious claims about the caus­es of polio and the dan­gers of vac­ci­na­tion. As Kep­pler notes:

Like today’s COVID skep­tics, Miller cher­ry-picked physi­cians who were skep­ti­cal of polio as a virus and mis­rep­re­sent­ed facts. One mail­er was a rapid fire of out-of-con­text infor­ma­tion: Salk “isn’t entire­ly sat­is­fied with the vac­cine.” Some chil­dren still got polio after being vac­ci­nat­ed. And just as the “real” num­ber of COVID-19 deaths pales in com­par­i­son to vac­cine deaths in some dark cor­ners of the inter­net, so it was with polio in Miller’s world: “Polio ‘CRIPPLES’ and Polio ‘DEATHS’ are mere­ly ‘Sta­tis­tics’ to the ‘Char­i­ty-Bro­kers,’ whose record to date of ‘Crip­ples’ and ‘Deaths’ is TRULY DISGRACEFUL.”

Like many con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists today, Miller’s claims con­tained sev­er­al ker­nels of truth, mis­placed in the ser­vice of a bizarre cru­sade. Research now ties excess con­sump­tion of soft drinks, white flour, and refined sug­ar to an increase in can­cers and heart dis­ease. In this, Miller was pre­scient, giv­en that these are the some of the biggest killers in the coun­try. But this had noth­ing to do with the polio virus. Miller’s uncrit­i­cal think­ing, mis­tak­ing large-scale cor­re­la­tions for cau­sa­tion, typ­i­fies con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries. His appeal to the wel­fare of chil­dren also strikes a famil­iar chord, but it’s unsur­pris­ing in this case, giv­en that “polio was a dis­ease of chil­dren,” says René F. Najera, edi­tor of the Col­lege of Physi­cians of Philadelphia’s His­to­ry of Vac­cines project, “so peo­ple were already afraid for their chil­dren.” Com­par­a­tive­ly, COVID-19 “has large­ly left chil­dren alone … so we don’t mobi­lize as much.”

Kep­pler draws many oth­er par­al­lels between Miller’s per­son­al anti-polio vac­cine project and the efforts today to resist the COVID-19 vac­cine, all rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Amer­i­can anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism and the well-fund­ed will to dis­be­lieve what the sci­ence clear­ly demon­strates. Miller dis­trib­uted mail­ers in schools around Flori­da, accept­ed hun­dreds in dona­tions, and print­ed thou­sands of pam­phlets for dis­tri­b­u­tion. He even offered to get inject­ed with the polio virus to show that it was harm­less. How­ev­er, “fed­er­al charges end­ed Miller’s cru­sade,” when he was charged with “send­ing ‘libel­lous, scur­rilous and defam­a­to­ry’ state­ments through the mail” in 1954, the year Salk read­ied nation­wide tri­als of the vac­cine. Five years lat­er, “U.S. polio cas­es were about 14 per­cent of what they were in 1952, thanks to vac­ci­na­tion,” not, as Miller would have the pub­lic believe, a change in diet. “Give us prop­er diets,” he con­tin­ued to write to news­pa­pers, “and we’ll solve the phys­i­cal imper­fec­tions of Amer­i­cans young and old.” He might have been on to a good argu­ment about nutri­tion just by chance, but the pub­lic had no rea­son to lis­ten to his opin­ions about polio sim­ply because he could afford to cir­cu­late them.

via Steve Sil­ber­man

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Elvis Pres­ley Gets the Polio Vac­cine on The Ed Sul­li­van Show, Per­suad­ing Mil­lions to Get Vac­ci­nat­ed (1956)

How the World’s First Anti-Vax Move­ment Start­ed with the First Vac­cine for Small­pox in 1796, and Spread Fears of Peo­ple Get­ting Turned into Half-Cow Babies

How Do Vac­cines (Includ­ing the COVID-19 Vac­cines) Work?: Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions

Dying in the Name of Vac­cine Free­dom

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness