A massive group has gathered to protest childhood vaccination requirements, which are currently mandatory for all infants, and in some areas, school-aged children. They see themselves as defenders of civil liberties, especially those of parents, who have the right to protect their children from disease in ways they see fit, without government say-so.
It’s a surprising coalition. Wealthy and poor. Some are concerned about side effects, and others have spiritual objections. Some think that the government is covering up vaccine horror stories and the reality behind the technology, while others believe in natural remedies and don’t want to introduce engineered substances into their children’s bodies. Quite a few have had terrible experiences with vaccines themselves – strange rashes, numbness, paralysis, brain fog. It’s not the government’s place to legislate bodies, they say. Some just don’t like being told what to do. They’ve lived through an epidemic, and childhood diseases are a constant threat. Another epidemic is coming; they just don’t know it yet.
This all sounds familiar. Except it’s the 1880s and we’re in Leicester, England.
Let’s get back to America in 2025. Last week HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr announced a “clean sweep” of a CDC vaccine advisory panel and a new slate of advisors. David Mansdoerfer, former deputy assistant secretary for HHS in the first Trump administration, praised the move in a post on X as “a huge win for the medical freedom [m]ovement.”
Kennedy rationalizes that this will help restore US public trust in vaccines, which is at a historic low. In a WSJ op-ed he wrote, “Some would try to explain this away by blaming misinformation or antiscience attitudes…to do so, however, ignores a history of conflicts of interest, persecution of dissidents, a lack of curiosity, and skewed science that has plagued the vaccine regulatory apparatus for decades.”
In fact, Kennedy presents a fairly accurate summary of arguments that have animated anti-vaccination movements, which have gone hand in hand with the existence of vaccination itself, especially mandatory vaccination. The historical record does reveal conflicts of interest, penalties for dissidents, opaque regulatory processes, and—sometimes—lack of institutional curiosity.
What got people riled up about vaccines in Victorian England was their compulsory nature and harsh penalties (19th-century vaccine acts levied fines and even imprisonment), as well as the fact that children were involved. Riots erupted across towns and organized opposition arose in the form of anti-vaccination leagues. The Leicester demonstration in 1885 drew almost 100,000 people and prompted a royal commission to investigate anti-vaccination concerns. Many of the most salient arguments used by anti-vaccination movements today were previewed here: vaccine mandates were “destructive of parental rights, tyrannical and unjust in operation, and ought, therefore, to be resisted by every constitutional means” (William Young, a chemist and leader of an anti-vaccination society). As Nadja Durbach reported in Lapham's, “After singing 'Rule, Britannia!' and burning copies of the Vaccination Acts, the crowd peacefully dispersed.”
The demands made by Britain's earliest anti-vaccination movement led to important changes that made vaccines safer and forced the government to address valid complaints about unequal access to quality medical care. The undeniable success of vaccines also helped. Before widespread immunization, the mortality rate for children under the age of five in theUnited Kingdom was 329 deaths per thousand births in 1800, meaning approximately 1 in 3 children born in 1800 did not survive to age five. People started to experience life without the same communicable diseases that might have killed them and their children. Experience eroded distrust. But as the spectre of deadly infectious diseases began to feel more distant — with many doctors (myself included) never seeing a case of measles in training — the fear of vaccination side effects grew, overshadowing living memory of disease.
It is an irony of successful public health campaigns that the more effective our interventions, the more abstract the threats they prevent become.
RFK's clean sweep is one of his boldest moves in a political career waging war against vaccines. But it’s not new for him personally or us collectively. Over the weekend, historians of medicine weighed in on his unique take on (debunked) miasma theory. In his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, he described vaccines as an environmental poison akin to the “bad airs” once believed to cause disease. As they say, history rhymes.
Public trust in vaccination has been eroding slowly, then precipitously with the COVID-19 pandemic, which reduced trust in science overall. Scholars cite a confluence of factors: misinformation about COVID-19, vaccine hesitancy and inequitable distribution, the rise of “vaccine fatigue,” erosion of trust in the vaccine regulatory processes, disenchantment with pharmaceutical companies, and declining belief in experts.
As many public health officials have stated, RFK's move to replace the entire roster of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices with advisors who have among them criticized pandemic lockdown policies and vaccines in general, and to do so without transparency or vetting, is not likely to remedy these issues. The advice of the ACIP often forms the basis by which providers and insurers make vaccines available, so the move could hinder access to vaccines, increase out-of-pocket vaccine costs, drive down vaccine innovation and production.
The National Anti-Vaccination League (whose local affiliate drove the Leicester protest) remained active until the 1970s. With successive epidemics and technologies, the same concerns that prompted 100,000 people to descend upon the Midlands town have risen to the surface. But last week’s announcement is a bit different – where anti-vaccine sentiment historically operated in a grassroots way or outside of formal political power, Kennedy’s “clean sweep” isn't just about vaccines; it's part of a broader governmental restructuring that echoes clean sweeps like DOGE and other “overhauls” characteristic of the current administration. We’re not talking about citizen resistance, where the Leicester protesters burned copies of vaccination acts in defiance of government policies; this move has made vaccine doubt part of government authority. Vaccine approval is getting more politicized, not less, focused on adhering to a predetermined narrative rather than evaluating evidence.
The idea of immunity is rooted in protection. And that’s why we have such primal reactions to it. Eula Biss writes in On Immunity: “Building, boosting, and supplementing one’s personal immune system is a kind of cultural obsession of the moment.” Ever since we became what philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls homo immunologicus – modern humans attempting to “optimize [our] cosmic and social immune status in the face of vague risks of life and acute certainties of death” –we've been obsessed with immunity. With what protects us and what we think protects us and what might breach that protection. We live in a vague state of protectionism, whatever our views on vaccination.
I’m thinking about doing a series of posts on the deeper histories of vaccination and resistance. Next up: something about how vaccinations got started (spoiler: it wasn’t Edward Jenner) and the global histories of variolation. Write me if you are interested or if there are topics you want to hear about!