There are increasing reports of an epidemic of measles among children in Texas and New Mexico, resulting in the first fatality in the U.S from that disease in a decade. Many of those infected are reported to have been unvaccinated. Apparently, failure to vaccinate children among some families in the area has led to the resurgence of the highly contagious disease.
Resistance to vaccination protection is found in all areas of the country. According to the Centers for Disease Control, during the 2023–2024 school year, vaccination rates for kindergartners declined for all reported vaccines. The CDC also reported that the decline in vaccination rates has been happening since before the Covid pandemic.
Current opposition to vaccinations has a long history, dating back to medical experiments in the 18th century that were seeking a cure for smallpox. The cause of the disease was a virus called variola, and it was called smallpox to distinguish it from the great pox, the common name for syphilis.
The method first used to immunize against smallpox, called variolation, involved inserting pus from a smallpox victim into superficial incisions made in another person’s skin. The patient would develop pustules like those caused by real smallpox, but fewer, and usually producing a milder disease and future immunity to the disease.
The use of variolation was introduced in North America 300 years ago during a smallpox epidemic in Boston, which eventually infected more than half the city’s population. Support for the procedure in Boston is credited to Cotton Mather, a noted Congregational minister. Mather had learned about variolation from his slave, Onesimus, who had been inoculated with smallpox in his native West Africa. After discovering that variolation had long been used in China and the Middle East, Mather persuaded a leading doctor, Zabdiel Boylston, who then championed the remedy.
In his history of Rye, Charles Baird describes the trouble that smallpox inoculation caused among Rye residents in the 1760s: “It awakened the liveliest fears of the ignorant everywhere. In some places inoculation was absolutely forbidden and physicians performing it were liable to severe penalties.”
A meeting in 1765 resulted in a town regulation that imposed a penalty of five pounds on “anyone who took any person into their home to be inoculated unless they had obtained permission from two Justices of the Peace and the Town Supervisor that it is “at a convenient place and from a publick road not nigh to neighbors.”
Despite support from Washington, Franklin, and Adams, widespread public resistance to inoculation still persisted in the early years of the Revolutionary War, causing the Continental Congress to issue a proclamation in 1776 prohibiting inoculation by military surgeons. Smallpox was rampant among the Continental army, but most of the British troops had been inoculated. Then in 1777, Washington ordered a mass inoculation of his troops, which some historians believe played an important role in winning the war.
A safer vaccination (the word comes from the Latin vacca, meaning cow) procedure was introduced by an Englishman, Edward Jenner, in 1798. After observing that milkmaids who had caught cowpox (a milder disease) did not later catch smallpox, he proved that vaccinating a patient with fluid from cowpox lesions would provide protection against smallpox.
Louis Pasteur’s 1885 rabies vaccine was the next to have a major impact on human disease. It was followed by the development of vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, polio, and other diseases.
But despite all of those successes, fears and confusion about vaccinations continue, especially now that the Department of Health and Human Services is headed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. According to Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia: “Kennedy will have authority to enact a series of changes at HHS that would ultimately impact the access, affordability, and effectiveness of vaccines in America.”
