Vaccine Hesitancy

As the COVID-19 vaccine rollout gains traction and we finally seem to have overcome the supply crunch, we now face a new problem- vaccine hesitancy. Although the number of Americans who are hesitant to take the vaccine has steadily been dropping as the numbers of vaccinated people rise with little or no side effects, there are still about 40% of folks who are currently against or undecided about the vaccine. Few of them are staunch anti-vaxxers who protest any vaccine but the majority of these are people who are hesitant to take it due to the uncertainty about the new vaccine.

Interestingly, vaccines have always met with skepticism beginning with the very first vaccine. In 1798, when Edward Jenner introduced the small pox vaccine, it was met with strong opposition and even caricatured in the press with grotesque illustrations of deformities including cow heads growing out of vaccinated people (because the vaccine was made from cow pox).

An 1802 anti-small pox vaccination caricature

In the U.S. too, the small pox vaccination was met with strong opposition at first. Benjamin Franklin experienced first hand the devastating effect of not getting getting vaccinated. He lost his infant son to small pox in 1736, causing him to appeal to the masses to take the vaccine: “I long regretted that I had not given it to him by inoculation, which I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that therefore the safer should be chosen.” It was incidentally Ben Franklin's city (and my hometown), Boston, that became the first American city to make the small pox vaccine mandatory in 1827 for school attendance.

Sources:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/03/america-is-now-in-the-hands-of-the-vaccine-hesitant/618352/
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. History of Vaccines Timelines. The College of Physicians of Philadelphia; (1885). Available from: http://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/timelines/all

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