El Mundo Traces Antivaccine Movement From 1772 Sermons To 2020 “Forces Of Evil” Claims

El Mundo traces the antivaccine movement to sermons and social media posts that frame vaccination as a spiritual threat, quoting Reverend Edmund Massey in 1772 and José Luis Mendoza in 2020 about “las fuerzas oscuras del mal” and a future “vacuna con un chip en cada uno de nosotros para controlar nuestra libertad.”

“From the beginnings of vaccination to today, the opponents' arguments have not changed much”

Agence Science-Presse

The same article links those themes to Edward Jenner’s work on smallpox vaccination, describing how Jenner observed immunity in women who milked cows and then demonstrated that he could immunize a child by infecting with an ampolla of the animal disease.

Agence Science-Presse

El Mundo says the backlash included the belief that Jenner’s remedy could “convert directly in un ternero,” and it describes satirical images where the “Vacunación” monster was depicted as a multi-animal figure ready to devour humanity.

El Mundo also quotes José Miguel Mulet, who argues that “El movimiento antivacunas no es más que la reacción que se produce siempre que hay un avance científico, hoy y hace 200 años,” and he compares modern claims about 5G to earlier fears about electrified cities.

The article adds that “Los académicos de la medicina consideran la vacunación como uno de los 10 máximos logros de la salud pública durante el siglo pasado,” and it cites UNICEF and a University of Carolina study as part of the pro-vaccination case.

Agence Science-Presse groups anti-vaccine messaging into three recurring argument categories: “vaccines are dangerous,” “natural treatments are more effective,” and “there is no reason to trust the authorities.”

In that same account, a 2021 literature review cited by Agence Science-Presse says the content disseminated by anti-vaccine groups resembles one another across three vaccines—human papillomavirus (HPV), measles, influenza—regardless of the platform used.

Ars Technica

Agence Science-Presse also describes how strategies have diversified, saying Anna Kata argues opponents will “denigrate studies favorable to vaccines while seeking only studies that seem to validate their point of view.”

Radio France likewise frames antivax claims as repeating over “two centuries,” and it quotes historian Laurent-Henri Vignaud about a rumor that “women would be sterilized by the vaccine,” alongside another fear that the remedy would contain “blood of Jews.”

Radio France adds that Louis Pasteur faced an economic suspicion, including Henri Rochefort calling him a “chemist-financier” in the 1880s, and it notes that England enacted its first compulsory vaccination law against smallpox in 1853.

Ars Technica describes a “family tree of vaccine opponents” through the categories in Thomas Levenson’s book A Pox on Fools, with the subtitle “The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines.”

“«Al infectarse deliberadamente a pacientes con una peligrosa enfermedad, los inoculadores tientan a la Providencia, e interfieren con la divina habilidad de enviar enfermedades y muertes como un castigo por el pecado»”

El Mundo

The same Ars Technica account says the accusations against vaccines can be used to categorize the arguments themselves as “wrong, they are bad, and they are intolerable,” and it points to early inoculation campaigns in London and Boston in 1721 involving Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Cotton Mather.

Ars Technica also recounts the moral backlash to inoculation, quoting the idea that it was “morally wrong… to interfere with the divine ordination of who would sicken and die and who would not.”

Mr Mondialisation situates the movement’s persistence in a longer timeline, saying the World Health Organization classified vaccine hesitancy among the ten major threats to global health in 2019 and that France saw “more than 40 percent of those surveyed” believe vaccines are not safe.

Mr Mondialisation further links the movement’s modern resurgence to a “possible collusion between the state and the pharmaceutical industry,” and it states that the first law mandating public vaccination was passed in 1951 in France.