Wired Article: Re Vaccines and the Anti-Vaccine Crusade

[Anonymous]

I've seen quite a few anti-vaccine articles pop up on this site in the last week or so and thought I would share this one. It's very long but a good read.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_waronscience/

I thought this was an interesting tidbit:

In 19th-century England, he explains, Jenner’s smallpox vaccine was known to be effective. But despite the Compulsory Vaccination Act of 1853, many people still refused to take it, and thousands died unnecessarily. “That was the birth of the anti-vaccine movement,” he says, adding that then — as now — those at the forefront “were great at mass marketing. It was a print-oriented society. They were great pamphleteers. And by the 1890s, they had driven immunization rates down to the 20 percent range.”

Immediately, smallpox took off again in England and Wales, killing 1,455 in 1893. Ireland and Scotland, by contrast, “didn’t have any anti-vaccine movement and had very high immunization rates and very little incidence of smallpox disease and death,” ...

[Anonymous]

Thanks for posting this. This was a great read.