Why Anti-Vaxxers Are Nothing New

We’re more than halfway through 2021 and the COVID-19 pandemic rages on throughout the world. Malaysia has just passed the grim milestone of 20,000 cases a day. More infectious variants such as Beta, Delta, and Lambda are on the rise. Repeated lockdowns have taken their toll on the economy. Amidst the threat of the virus, people have lost loved ones, livelihoods, and even their will to live. Things are looking bleak.

But unlike in 2020, we now have an effective, non-economically damaging way of fighting back: vaccination. Multiple COVID-19 vaccines worldwide are in various phases of rollout, such as Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca, and Sinovac. In Malaysia, the process for getting one varies from appointment via the MySejahtera app to outreach programs for more rural areas. Walk-ins are now allowed in certain parts of the country. What matters is that more and more people are getting vaccinated.

Including me: I had my second Pfizer dose last month. I am now considered fully vaccinated. That does not mean I can’t still get infected, because I can. I’d just be much less likely to end up in the hospital. If anything, we’re only in the pandemic’s second act. The Delta variant moves fast; you can get it from breathing the same air as an infected person for a few seconds. 

And yet amid so much turmoil, some people remain convinced that this is all a conspiracy, that the vaccines are a scam to inject us with microchips and turn us into sheep or whatever. These people believe that COVID-19 doesn’t exist. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But a glance back at history shows us that reactions like these are nothing if not predictable.

Today I’m talking about why anti-vaxxers are nothing new.

First, let’s go over a brief refresher on how our bodies’ immune systems work and what, precisely, these vaccines actually do.

How Does the Immune System Work Anyway?

There’s an old Disney movie called Osmosis Jones that characterized the immune system as our bodies’ police force. It’s close enough. The immune system is the collective term for the various organs, tissues, and cells that work together to combat threats to the body. These could be germs, foreign substances, or mutations within the body itself, e.g., cancer.

More specifically, there are two distinct subsections to the immune system: the innate immune system, which activates a blanket response against common viruses and bacteria; and the adaptive immune system, which learns to target specific threats which have been encountered before. The latter is integral to how vaccines work.

Let’s take a common childhood disease, chickenpox, also known as varicella. Everyone knows that if you’re infected once you’ll almost always be immune for the rest of your life. (I caught it when I was ten or eleven, no idea how.) But why? It’s the adaptive immune system to the rescue! Having suffered through the first infection, your body has learned to recognize the varicella-zoster virus (VZV) and will unleash a blistering assault on any future incursions.

The History of Vaccination

This is where vaccines come in: they intentionally activate the adaptive immune system. ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ isn’t just a quote. As early as 16^th century China, a method called variolation involved exposing healthy people, often children, to scabs and secretions from those infected with smallpox as a means of inoculation; this caused them to contract a milder form of the disease. The practice became common in many parts of the world. Because individuals treated this way could still transmit smallpox to others, variolation sometimes led to further outbreaks and public backlash. But anyone who survived would be immune.

Source: The History of Vaccines

An English doctor, Edward Jenner, developed the first true vaccine in 1796 based on a similar insight: country milkmaids who’d had the mild disease of cowpox never contracted its far more dangerous cousin, smallpox. (The word ‘vaccine’ is derived from vacca, or ‘cow’ in Latin.) His experiments with inserting pus from cowpox-infected individuals into the arms of children granted them immunity. Jenner was widely mocked and ridiculed for his work, but the results were undeniable. Within 150 years, this once-deadly illness had been completely eradicated.

The same story can be told for many other historically terrible diseases such as polio, measles, and tuberculosis. Through vaccines, antibiotics, and modern medical treatments, these illnesses either no longer exist or are far less of a threat than they once were. COVID-19 is just the latest in a long, long line of illnesses attacking vulnerable human bodies which haven’t had a chance to develop immunity before some form of effective treatment was developed.

But getting people to believe in those treatments could be an uphill battle. From the 19^th century onwards, reasons for vaccine hesitancy have ranged from religious and sanitary concerns about inserting foreign matter into the body to resentment towards government laws requiring it, to wilder ideas about sterilization and biological warfare. Anti-vaccination organizations, protests, and beliefs have been around as long as vaccines themselves. 

An anti-vaccine poster from the 19th century.

In fact, many modern safety practices were once the subject of heated debate.

The Problem With Public Opinion

Did you know that seat belts, of all things, were once considered controversial?

During the mid-twentieth century, there were major debates about them in the United States where they were first introduced. They were restrictive and uncomfortable, detractors claimed. These restraints could trap passengers in a burning car or prevent them from being thrown clear of an accident to safety. The government had no right to impose these ridiculous laws impinging on people’s freedoms, they said. Using a seat belt should be an individual’s personal choice.

An instrument of tyranny.

The reason this sounds like nonsense today, of course, is hard evidence. What are the odds of surviving being ‘thrown clear’ headfirst into oncoming traffic? The effects of sudden and immediate deceleration on the human body are common knowledge nowadays. But this wasn’t always so. Once, the idea of having to restrain yourself in a moving vehicle was radical and dangerous.

Or for a medical example: washing our hands. Since childhood, we’ve all been taught this most basic of personal hygiene practices. Everybody knows how germs spread through contact and that keeping your hands clean is a smart thing to do. But this wasn't always the case.

In 1847, the spread of diseases was still poorly understood. A Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis was struggling to understand the high mortality rates among women giving birth in his hospital. Eventually, he realized that these mothers were far more likely to fall ill and die if attended to by doctors and students who’d come to deliver the baby fresh from an autopsy. (Gross.) Midwives were not required to deal with dead bodies, and their care alone in an alternate ward led to a much higher chance of survival.

Semmelweis mandated a new rule requiring handwashing with chlorine for doctors. Death rates in his maternity ward fell dramatically; this was the first evidence ever that washing hands could prevent the spread of disease. But the practice was unpopular. Some doctors disliked the implication that they were to blame for the deaths and gave it up. Semmelweis attempted to spread his doctrine of handwashing to other parts of Europe only for it to be considered controversial. The practice only truly caught on after his death.

Fast Times and Fake News

There have always been, and always will be, resistance to new methods, technologies, and new ways of behaving. In the face of nationwide lockdowns, economic hardship, and being told that we need to behave in certain ways for our own safety, the more individualistic of us are bound to resist. Wild ideas have always flourished in the face of change. That is nothing new.

What is new is how interconnected humanity has become. Information travels fast nowadays. Propaganda, fake news, and misinformation are all too easy to disseminate for a susceptible audience. Online communities provide social validation for beliefs that most people would rightly call crazy, encouraging budding conspiracists to fall deeper down the rabbit hole. And the sheer volume of information that the internet affords us is overwhelming. How do we know what to believe?

I’d say taking an interest in the actual science and data, for starters. Do your own research, the conspiracy people cry. And I agree with that. I also believe in a healthy dose of skepticism and paying attention to who’s doing the talking. A health director-general with decades of medical experience is going to know more about treating illnesses than, oh, let’s say a billionaire politician telling people to drink bleach. Putting our faith in the professionals, not just some quack with a YouTube channel.

Yeah, maybe not this guy.

But conspiracy theories will always be around. Just like demonic possession was so often blamed for mental illness, people will always invent sinister reasons for what they don’t understand. Because at least that way, there’s a plan. Someone’s behind all of this; somebody’s in charge.

It’s a lot scarier to think that no one is in charge. That the world is complete chaos, plain and simple. You could get hit by a car or find a cancerous growth or fall and break your leg tomorrow. Nobody knows how the future will play out. No one ever knows.

Conclusion

When I got my first Pfizer dose, I barely felt a thing. Was this it, I wondered while waiting in the hall for my second appointment. I didn’t feel faint or dizzy. No allergic reactions, thankfully. What did happen was that my shoulder began to ache throughout the afternoon. By nighttime, it hurt a lot, and numbness had set in. But the next day, the pain was already receding. I felt fatigued and out of breath for a day or two. Then I was fine.

After the second dose, my arm didn’t even hurt as much. Instead, I had prolonged palpitations twice in the days afterward. I’ve had them in the past due to too much sugar, caffeine, and stress. But I'm pretty sure these two times were because of the vaccine – because I haven’t had any palpitations since. None at all. The Pfizer vaccine is supposed to affect a minority of young people’s hearts. But hey, I’m not dead yet.

Any long-term effects of these new vaccines remain to be seen. I don’t deny that. None of us should. What we do know is that COVID-19 is real, present, and killing people right now.

Vaccination is not a silver bullet, but herd immunity is what will beat this thing, starve it into more manageable numbers. It remains to be seen whether COVID-19 can be completely eradicated like polio and smallpox. But we can and will turn the tide. I look forward to the day when we can move around freely again, stop wearing masks, and meet far-off loved ones face to face.

That day isn’t here yet. But it will be. We just need to do our part for now.