In 1898, British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace published a pamphlet entitled, "Vaccination a Delusion; Its Penal Enforcement a Crime." This work became the foundation of the modern anti-vax movement. Derek discusses how even though vaccination science is constantly evolving, the rhetoric of people like RFK Jr is just rehashing old and outdated ideas.
Show Notes
Vaccination a Delusion; Its Penal Enforcement a Crime
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She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero.
She was stoic, modest, tough.
Someone who inspired people.
Everyone thought they knew her until they didn't.
I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, Is this real?
Is this real?
I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying.
This is a story that's all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh.
I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right?
And I maximized that while I was lying.
Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah, wherever you get your podcasts.
I think, you know, I'm a freedom of choice person.
We should have transparency.
We should have informed choice.
But if people don't want it, the government shouldn't force them to do it.
There are adverse events from the vaccine.
It does cause deaths every year.
It causes all the illnesses that measles itself, cause encephalitis and blindness, et cetera.
And so people ought to be able to make that choice for themselves.
That's Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talking to Sean Hannity on March 11th.
You probably remember that one as it's burned into memory as he's steak and shake RFKing the fries by cooking them in beef tallow.
Kennedy said a lot that day, as he is wont to do, but today I just want to focus on this one clip because it lies at the heart of the anti-vaccination movement.
And I mean literally.
To understand this movement and to contextualize Kennedy's place in a rather long lineage, I'm going to turn to the work of British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist Alfred Russell Wallace.
In 1898, Wallace published a pamphlet called, Vaccination a Delusion?
It's Penal Enforcement a Crime.
Now, he did not include a question mark as I do in the title here, so he was making a declarative statement there.
The pamphlet is an attack on the findings of the Royal Commission on Vaccination, whose 1896 report in the UK became a landmark in public health history.
I'm Derek Barris, and you're listening to a Conspirituality Brief.
Vaccination, a delusion?
As always, you can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod.
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Okay, let's get into it.
The findings of the Royal Commission on Vaccination sound rather quaint today, but if you're a Wallace fan, they're pretty conspiratorial.
Here they are.
The commission concluded that vaccination against smallpox significantly reduced both the incidence and severity of the disease.
It found that vaccinated individuals were less likely to contract smallpox, and if they did, they suffered less severe cases compared to the unvaccinated.
While acknowledging that vaccination was not entirely without risk, the commission determined that serious adverse effects were rare.
The overall benefits of vaccination were judged to outweigh the potential harms.
Next, they also acknowledged the role of improved sanitation and public health measures in reducing smallpox mortality, but they maintained that vaccination was a crucial tool in controlling outbreaks.
And finally, the Commission recognized widespread public dissatisfaction with the compulsory nature of vaccination laws, particularly the use of cumulative penalties such as repeated fines and imprisonments for non-compliance.
They noted that such measures were harsh and counterproductive and fostered resistance rather than compliance.
So at the time, if you refused vaccination, you could be legally penalized.
Now here's where their recommendations come in, and there are three of them.
First off, they recommended to end those penalties for non-compliance.
They allowed a conscientious objection clause so that parents who didn't believe vaccination was safe or necessary could legally exempt their children from compulsory vaccination.
In their eyes, this reduced social conflict and it respected individual liberty.
Finally, the commission recommended improving the quality and safety of vaccination procedures, including better training for vaccinators and more sanitary practices.
If all of this sounds familiar, it is because this was one of the reports, and then a few years later in the U.S., the creation of what would become the FDA, that all became the foundation of what we now term public health.
So like I said, sounds basic, but at the time, it was not.
I came across Wallace's pamphlet while I've been reading Arthur Allen's 2007 book.
It's called Vaccine, The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver.
I want to note this is not Arthur Lee Allen, the Zodiac Killer.
Arthur Allen is a longtime science writer who is currently a senior correspondent for the very excellent publication, KFF Health News.
His book is the most exhaustive in the history of vaccines that I've read personally, and I've read about 10 books on this topic because I'm really interested in understanding this topic and how much hatred and misunderstanding it fuels.
The one thing I actually appreciate about Allen's work is that he went into the researching and writing phase in order to take the concerns of anti-vaxers seriously.
I've repeatedly stated on this podcast that the anti-vax movement was born the day the first vaccines were administered.
That is true.
But Allen shows how in the 18th and 19th centuries, there were very good reasons to be skeptical.
There were no known dosage amounts.
Early inoculations were taken directly from cow pus and then sent to different states and cities to inoculate children and adults.
Shipping was a nightmare, as you can imagine.
And then there was an entire fake vaccine network that were sending out junk chemicals that ended up sickening people.
I didn't know about that.
I'd be pretty pissed too if I got some fake vaccine.
This is the era of snake oil, however.
Yet Allen shows, going from Cotton Mather and Edward Jenner forward, and also looking backward from the centuries of inoculation practices in China and Africa that really informed the American vaccination understanding that vaccines have always been part of an evolving science.
And it was at the turn of the 20th century that things got a lot more reliable thanks to regulations.
Now, not completely reliable, and this is an important caveat.
And unfortunately, it's one that anti-vaxxers often exploit.
The Royal Commission on Vaccination, well, they provided one of the most important foundations for making the practices of public health accessible and realistic.
Which brings us back to Alfred Russell Wallace.
He was born a naturalist, basically.
He's most famous for independently conceiving the theory of evolution by natural selection.
He presented his findings jointly with Charles Darwin in 1858.
Wallace's work is basically the reason Darwin published on the origin of species in the first place.
He was initially hesitant to make his findings public.
He knew there was going to be a major backlash predominantly from religious people, but also from scientists.
Yet he was aware that Wallace was going to be crowned the discoverer of evolution by natural selection if he didn't get the book out.
So human ego wins once again.
Wallace, besides his work in biology and anthropology, was a public intellectual.
He was a social critic.
He advocated for socialism, for land nationalization, pacifism, and women's suffrage.
He dabbled in spiritualism and ended up believing that a higher intelligence was involved in human development, which sometimes put him at odds with his scientific contemporaries, as did his views on vaccination.
In the early 1880s, he became a prominent figure in the debate over compulsory smallpox vaccination in England.
He viewed it as an issue of personal liberty, but his stance ended up evolving after he saw data that was provided by anti-vaccination activists.
From then on, he began to question the effectiveness of vaccination and grew concerned about its safety.
And this is where we might think Wallace is actually RFK Jr.'s grandfather.
So here are the arguments he makes in the pamphlet.
Wallace doubted that vaccinations significantly reduced smallpox mortality.
He argued that improvements in hygiene and public sanitation were really what caused the decline in smallpox cases.
You've likely heard Kennedy making the same arguments around polio.
It is one thing that anti-vaxxers cling to.
Wallace accused vaccination proponents of using misleading or false statistics.
Sound familiar?
He conducted his own analyses, claiming that the data did not support the effectiveness of vaccination.
I mean, at least in his case, he was a scientist, whereas Kennedy just plays one on social media.
I would still doubt what Wallace was actually looking at, given the charts that he puts in the pamphlet.
You can read it online, by the way.
So if you're at all interested, I'll include it in the show notes.
Now, as I mentioned, Wallace believed compulsory vaccination laws were a violation of individual rights and the sanctity of the home.
He argued that these laws were a gross interference with personal liberty and that decisions about health should not be dictated by the state, which, I don't know, is a bit odd given that he was a socialist.
I find those lines fascinating, right?
Because if you're advocating for full socialism, communism, now I don't know what level Wallace is at, but you're basically giving the state control over bureaucracies.
And yet when he didn't agree with a bureaucracy, he didn't want it to impede on personal freedoms.
I find this often happens with these sorts of political lines.
Like one example that always comes up is if you're true to libertarianism, then you're affording people their personal liberties.
It's like, do what you want, leave me to do what I want.
That's a very broad overview, but that's the basis of the philosophy.
Yet I've seen libertarians arguing online that transgender people aren't natural.
And from a biological perspective, I mean, A, that's just not true, but from a social construct, you are basically saying, let me have my freedoms, but that freedom you want over there, you can't have that one because I don't believe in it.
And I find those sort of hypocrisies really disturbing if you're going to call yourself a member of some philosophical group or political party.
Also, I want to point out that this one, the idea that compulsory vaccination laws shouldn't be allowed, I actually do agree with that.
I don't think anyone should be forced to take any sort of medication.
Now, this sentiment, which traces itself back to Wallace and honestly before that, was weaponized by anti-vaxxers during COVID because they would say that the state was forcing them to get vaccines.
That didn't happen.
There were no forced mass vaccinations Or even individual vaccinations.
There were circumstances where, if you wanted to keep your job, you had to be vaccinated.
That's more about the free market.
And if you even talk about government jobs, that is just indicative of public health bureaucracies.
You can disagree with it, but those agencies are allowed to do what they think is necessary for the health of their staff and for the society in general.
So I'm not against businesses or schools requiring vaccination, but I don't think in any world, someone should just be forced to take one.
So these lines got really blurred because the way that anti-vaxxers in the modern era have been weaponizing it is by saying that there were forced vaccinations.
No, there were not.
There were always conditions under which vaccines were required and you did not have to take them.
And I know it's a challenging argument because you've probably heard people say, oh, if you don't like a job, just get another one.
Yeah, that's really fucking hard.
Most of us who've worked for a lot of different companies and worked for a living our entire lives, not at a CEO or management level where it's easy to hop to other places.
Not saying it's always easy there either, but people who have connections and networks, it makes it a little easier.
For most of the population who doesn't have those, the idea of just jumping to another job is not a reality for many people.
So I understand that part of the argument as well, but I don't like people saying that you must get a vaccine or presenting it as if the government ever made that declaration.
They did not.
Point four by Wallace.
He pointed out that unsanitary vaccination practices could cause harm, and he believed vaccination was responsible for a significant number of deaths from related diseases.
Again, sound familiar.
He doesn't have any proof for that, but that was his belief.
And finally, Wallace saw that the medical establishment's support for vaccination as being influenced by vested interests.
The money from, well, pharmaceutical companies weren't really around, but the money was coming from somewhere.
So there's always someone funding it, some dark money coming in.
So you put all these things together, and Wallace's pamphlet really formed the foundation of the anti-vax movement.
Although all of his ideas were already circulating for generations, he sort of codified them by writing them down in one place.
And you can really hear Kennedy's echoing throughout time when he frames things like this.
So here's Wallace, quote, at the end of the main inquiry as to the effect of vaccination on smallpox, the commissioners adopt a very hesitating tone.
They say that where vaccination has been most thorough, the protection appears to have been greatest, and that the re-vaccination of adults appears to place them in so favorable a condition as compared with the unvaccinated.
But why say appears in both these cases?
He then goes on saying there should have been certainty.
And he should have known better as a scientist.
Actual experts in scientific fields qualify their statements because they're being cautious.
When you get to certainty, fanaticism often follows.
Remember when a few months ago Kennedy said that autism must be caused by an environmental exposure?
That's not how science works.
You can assume that autism is caused by an environmental exposure, but then you test it to discover whether or not that is true.
Apparently, Kennedy has no interest in such pettiness.
He wants to have a conclusion and work backwards to make it real, which was shown in everything in that Maha Commission report.
Those seven fake AI apparently generated studies that were shown as proof.
Kennedy and his henchmen like Kaylee Means, they were out saying, well, the content, what was actually in the report is still true.
But if you're making up studies, the science is the context.
If the context is faked in order to get somewhere, that is not science.
So he had a conclusion.
They probably wrote it and then just made up shit in order to justify it.
We see this over and over again.
Meanwhile, the U.S. just hit its highest number of measles cases in one year since the disease was deemed eradicated in 2000.
And we're only halfway through 2025.
The only other year that was anywhere near this level was 2019 when measles ripped through predominantly unvaccinated Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in New York City.
Outbreaks have occurred this year in 16 states and we're still going.
I know here in Oregon, we recently clocked our first case.
Hopefully it remains isolated.
I personally got an MMR vaccine in February when Kennedy took power because I was born in 1975 when only one dose was recommended.
So I wanted to make sure I was protected and getting a titer test was expensive.
So why not?
Next week, in fact, I'll be getting my shingles vaccine.
I just turned 50 a few weeks ago and I've had family members who have gotten it and I saw what they go through.
So no thank you.
One of the most frustrating aspects of all this is how many advancements are occurring in vaccination science right now.
We're actually looking at a near future where some cancer vaccines are going to be a reality, most likely.
mRNA technology is incredible.
We should be celebrating it.
But instead, the anti-vaxxers have been sucking all of the oxygen out of the proverbial room known as America.
And this has been their MO for a long time.
Every year, they're helping contribute to declining vaccination rates.
And now every year, more Americans are falling Ill from completely preventable diseases.
And as we know, but maybe Kennedy doesn't, infectious diseases are a cause of chronic diseases.
You can't seriously address the latter without protecting against the former.
And so the science keeps evolving while the anti-vax argument remains the same, stagnant, out of touch, and dangerous.
You could read Wallace's pamphlet, and besides the style of English it's written in, it feels like it could have been published this year.
Now, Wallace actually did have more ground to publish it given that he was a scientist and vaccinations were definitely dicier at that time, but Kennedy has no such excuses.
All he has is a centuries-old argument that falls flat in the face of generations of advances in knowledge.
And yet, the stubborn never cease easily.
Wallace ends his pamphlet by writing, quote, absolute and immediate abolition is the only rational course open to us.
Every day the vaccination laws remain in force, parents are being punished, infants are being killed.
An act of a single clause will repeal these vile laws, and I call upon every one of our legislators to consider their responsibilities as the guardians of the liberties of the English people and to insist that this repeal be effected without a day's unnecessary delay.
The good news is that Wallace didn't have any political power to enact such legislation at the time.
