a column by Colleen O’Brien
I remember my smallpox vaccination – a round mark on my upper left arm made by some medical tool that looked like a needle. My round mark looked like my sisters’ and all my friend’s round marks; we learned this by comparing them. The shot itself was not painful and we did not get sick from it.
Children no longer have to get the shot.
The World Health Organization officially notified the public on this day, December 9, 1979, that the killer disease called smallpox had been eradicated across the globe.
It took the World Health Organization an ongoing 20 years to convince the citizens of the world that a vaccination against this virulent infectious disease had been discovered and would not hurt them but would help them. In the 17th century, 400,000 people a year died from it in Europe alone. A third of those who lived through the ordeal of smallpox were blinded by the disease. Eighty percent of children who contracted it died.
One would think that last fact alone – the danger of one’s children dying – would prompt parents to vaccinate their offspring. But there has for millennia existed a lack of trust in education and science, not to mention authority.
This is understandable: authority, in the very olden days, having a lot to do with making slaves out of entire populations, keeping all the wealth and food for only the higher-ups in society, starting wars for reasons no peasant could figure out even as he wound up a soldier in the war.
On top of an understandable lack of trust in authority, there probably has always been, since cave days, a human propensity to spread “information” even though it’s made up, exaggerated or a lie. Misinterpretation, vague ideas, anecdotal evidence, distrust of a lot more people than you trust – fear reigns.
That basic word of mouth that has always been with us was as speedy then as the internet now.
And yet, when the idea of vaccines and then the vaccines themselves started coming along in the late 1700s and into the 19th century, people were more afraid of the cure than the killer.
This had to do with fear of science, fear of quack doctors, fear of government forcing them to do something they didn’t understand. The word-of-mouth complaints had to do with the invasive use of needles, with various religious doctrines, with the idea that science was a lie. Politicians invariably inflamed and confused the facts of vaccines by latching onto one side or the other to get votes.
So, now, two decades into the 21st century, in the infamous year 2020, living in fear of (or not) and possibly dying from COVID-19 is the name of the game. With a few vaccines on the horizon, millions of people are already saying, “Not for me, by god.”
Fine. Don’t get the vaccine. It will take 20 years or so to corral the beast otherwise, maybe never even eradicate it like we’ve done with smallpox (A sidebar: we were happy to see measles eradicated in this country in 2000 after its having been around for 12 centuries in other parts of the globe.) And then the anti-vacciners lit up the internet, resulting in communities once again being affected by the highly contagious, quick-spreading disease.)
Humans have recorded thousands of years of suffering and dying from various pestilences. And now we have the possibilities of disposing of them more quickly than ever before. Our only problem is us, once again, and those of us who know we know more than the average bear. We are louder than those who know we have a lot to learn and can learn a few things from inquisitive scientists.
We could be going with the flow, but as Fitzgerald said, “We beat on, boats against the current….”
