To Vax or Not to Vax: The Debate as Old as Vaccines Themselves
ENDNOTES
Since 2020, the modern world has been bombarded with the latest pandemic, COVID-19, and countries around the world have launched vaccination efforts to mitigate its effects. Along with the virus, vaccine controversy has also spread. Just as COVID-19 is not the world’s first pandemic, this is not the first time that vaccines have been debated. The first vaccination campaign was aimed against smallpox, a variola virus that has existed for approximately 3000 years and has been the source of epidemics across the old world since the eleventh century.1 The Spanish Royal Philanthropic Expedition (SRPE), aimed to eradicate smallpox through a widespread vaccination program in the Americas in 1803. It had philanthropic motivations on the surface, which hid the Spanish colonizers’ need to ensure a healthy, exploitable labour force. This vaccination campaign was riddled with minority exploitation, European arrogance, and untested science. What are the major similarities and differences with the current pandemic and the first vaccination campaign in 1803? While the SRPE was less effective, researched, and widespread than COVID-19 vaccines, it received much of the same backlash started humanity’s use of vaccines to fight viruses. Smallpox epidemics had devastating effects on the Indigenous populations, but with the novel introduction of Edward Jenner’s vaccine, the Spanish monarchy decided to try and stop the spread.2 After smallpox was introduced to the Americas in 1518, Indigenous Americans experienced smallpox case-fatality rates over fifty percent.3 Europeans were not as drastically affected by smallpox after the introduction of variolation in 1717.4 While variolation, the introduction of contents of a pustule from an infected person to a healthy person, was commonly practiced, it still had a 2% fatality rate and was accompanied by a plethora of complications such as the transmission of syphilis and severe scarring.5 In 1797, Edward Jenner discovered that individuals could be inoculated with the contents of cowpox pustules to protect them from the smallpox virus.6
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Edward Jenner vaccinating a child with his new cowpox vaccine, University of Alicante, “Balmis Bicentennial Images.” Balmis Bicentennial, 2019. Fair use.
