A pox on anti-vaxxers

Picture the scene. It’s freezing, with snow on the ground. A bunch of young men – well, more than a bunch, more like 2000 of them – are standing around, cold, wet and hungry: food’s in short supply, they’ve got little money to buy any from nearby farms, and though they’re armed and have threatened people with their weapons for food, it doesn’t always work too well.

Why are they armed? Because these lads, most of them farmboys until only a few months ago are, in principle, an army. Far from home, with little training, badly provisioned and inadequately equipped but an army nonetheless.

They’re camped outside a city which they’re besieging. Without much luck so far. Actually, with little hope of success in the future either. The city’s well-protected by walls and reasonably well garrisoned by troops, a core of them professionals, with more on the way. They, unlike the besiegers, have enough food and ammunition.

And then, to make things worse still even though they were already bad enough, disease strikes the besieging army. A horrible disease, that kills 20-30% of the people infected, and leaves others disfigured. One more scourge for these young lads, nearly half of whom fall sick, alongside the weather and the enemy. 

It’s no wonder they had to abandon the siege even before the enemy’s reinforcements arrived. Much diminished, by losses to disease as well as to battle, they had to slink home, beaten and demoralised. And with that, the most comprehensive defeat suffered by American forces during their War of Independence, the history of Canada was determined. It would remain an independent nation, never absorbed into the United States.

The city was, by our standards, basically a market town. The population was about 14,000, at a time when London counted 650,000. By North American standards of the time though, Quebec City was a major centre, only a thousand or two behind, say, Boston, one of the great cities of the thirteen revolting British colonies that later formed the US.

My apologies. I meant, of course, one of the thirteen British colonies then in revolt.

Smallpox (variola) virus

What about the disease? It was smallpox. It caused ravages among the besiegers because few if any of them had immunity. Many of the British defenders of the city, on the other hand, were immune. Partly this was because the disease was much more common in Britain than in North America, leading to many catching the disease as children, leaving the survivors protected against the disease. Partly it was due to the increasing use of inoculation in Britain.

That’s inoculation with smallpox itself. Pus would be taken from a smallpox patient and rubbed into scratches made on a healthy person, giving them a dose of the disease that, it was hoped, would remain mild while still generating immunity. Mostly, that worked, though occasionally people got seriously ill and might even die. In addition, inoculated people had the disease, so they could infect others. 

Indeed, it seems that the defenders of Quebec City sent out prostitutes infected with smallpox, possibly through inoculation, to the American lines, where they spread the disease widely, boys being boys, especially a long way from home.

Handled with care, however, inoculation with smallpox – variolation, as it was called – generally worked well. Thomas Jefferson travelled from Virginia, where the practice was discouraged and heavily restricted by law, to Philadelphia to get himself inoculated. His fellow Virginian, George Washington, himself a smallpox survivor, insisted on his soldiers being inoculated to avoid a repetition of what had happened in Quebec. 

Jefferson and Washington had to fight for variolation against determined and sometimes violent opposition. There were anti-variolation riots in Virginia, in response to inoculation campaigns, in both 1768 and 1769. The same sentiments espoused by anti-vaxxers today were in evidence back then, even before the first vaccine had been developed.

That didn’t happen until 1796, when Edward Jenner inoculated a patient with material not from a human smallpox victim, but from a cow with cowpox. Cowpox is far less severe than smallpox, making the procedure almost entirely safe, but the protection was as good. Based on the Latin word vacca for cow, this procedure came to be known as vaccination.

So anti-vaxxers could at last earn their name.

But anti-inoculators had already launched the tradition. The results were obvious at Quebec City. It cost a lot of American young men their lives, and inflicted a serious defeat on the cause they served. There will be two schools of thought as to whether that served Canadians well or badly, by keeping them separate from the United States. Either way, the impact was substantial.

What’s certain is that the movement against inoculation did a lot of people a great deal of harm. It cost a lot of lives. And the latter-day heirs of that movement are doing the same today.

Anti-vaxxer sentiments? Just say no. They’ll kill your health, and possibly you.