I had forgotten the huge numbers of people who have died from (very) infectious diseases for which we now have vaccines - hundreds of millions of them. Maybe a billion or more. Including more than 90% of the indigenous population of the Americas. A claim which is corroborated in general terms at reference 1, which includes the fact that 20 million of them were Mexicans. Deaths which greatly increased the demand for slaves from Africa.
The word 'inoculate' started out as a fancy gardeners' term, from the Latin, for budding, whereby a bud of the desired tree is introduced under the bark of a carrier tree.
While the viruses needed to make vaccines are grown in bottles containing huge numbers of cells, all derived from a very small amount of tissue from a very small number of humans. And given that at least one the humans involved was a foetus, something else for the right-to-life crew to get hot and bothered about.
We have a claim that better educated, older mothers are more likely to be difficult about inoculation because they think they know best. They have done all the necessary research on the Internet.
Resistance to inoculation is also mixed up with the current tendency to favour sensational stories in the wider media over advice from the experts, which last, as a class, seem to be having a rough time of it just now. Just think of Brexit, with virtually all serious commentators being remainers. And some of the sensational stories mentioned by Francis do seem truly awful: it is depressing that they get the traction they do.
Francis also mentions that fact that the doctor, one Andrew Wakefield, who was struck off in this country for spreading false news about inoculations, continues to thrive in the US, to the extent of being invited to Trump flavoured bashes. To the extent, inter alia, of more than a 100 hospitalisations and 3 deaths in Ireland alone.
Vaccination of a sort for smallpox has been around for more than a 1,000 years, kicking off in China. But the current method, apparently invented by a Dorset farmer and successfully taken up by Jenner, was much better. With one side effect being that Napoleon had half his army inoculated. So what with that and all the blankets and such he bought from up north, we might have done better to enforce the blockade more carefully. We might have managed without the carnage of Waterloo altogether. The politicians of the day had clearly caved in to commercial interests. Plus ça change.
The bottom line seems to be, echoed in a recent number of the Guardian, that compulsion in these matters is probably not the way forward, at least not at a national level. Education and gentle persuasion seems to work better.
PS: maybe we should stop being so sniffy about the Chinese wanting state control of Internet content until we have come up with some better way of keeping the beast under control!
Reference 1: Ancient Americans - Charles C. Mann - 2005.
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