Anti-vaccine activism, which collectively constitutes the "anti-vax" or "anti-vaxx" movement, is a set of organized activities expressing opposition to vaccination. These collaborating networks often seek to increase vaccine hesitancy by disseminating vaccine misinformation and disinformation. As a social movement, it employs tools ranging from traditional news media to various forms of online communication. Activists have primarily—though not exclusively—focused on opposing childhood vaccination, and have sought to expand their influence from niche subgroups into national political debates.
Ideas that later coalesced into anti-vaccine activism predate vaccines themselves. The movement, along with fringe doctors, has propagated various myths and conspiracy theories, alongside misinformation and disinformation. These efforts have significantly increased vaccine hesitancy and influenced public policy regarding the ethical, legal, and medical aspects of vaccination. In contrast, there is no substantive debate or hesitancy within mainstream medical circles about the benefits of vaccination; the scientific consensus is "clear and unambiguous" in favor of vaccines. Despite this consensus, the anti-vaccine movement has been partially successful in distorting the public understanding of science in popular culture.
History
18th and 19th century Ideas that would eventually coalesce into anti-vaccine activism have existed for longer than vaccines themselves. Some philosophical approaches (e.g. homeopathy, vitalism) are incompatible with the microbiological paradigm that explains how the immune system and vaccines work. Vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccine activism exist within a broader context that involves cultural tradition, religious belief, approaches to health and disease, and political affiliation.
Opposition to variolation for smallpox (a predecessor to vaccination) was organized as early as the 1720s around the premise that vaccination was unnatural and an attempt to thwart divine judgment. Citing Edmund Massey, "A Sermon against the Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation, preached at St. Andrew's Holborn", July 8, 1722. Religious arguments against inoculation, the earliest arguments against vaccination, were soon advanced. For example, in a 1722 sermon entitled "The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation", the English theologian Reverend Edmund Massey argued that diseases are sent by God to punish sin and that any attempt to prevent smallpox via inoculation is a "diabolical operation".Early religious opposition:
It was customary at the time for popular preachers to publish sermons, which reached a wide audience. This was the case with Massey, whose sermon reached North America, where there was early religious opposition, particularly by John Williams. A greater source of opposition there was William Douglass, a medical graduate of Edinburgh University and a Fellow of the Royal Society, who had settled in Boston.
Vaccination itself was invented by British physician Edward Jenner, who published his findings on the efficacy of the practice for smallpox in 1798. By 1801, the practice had been widely endorsed in the scientific community and by several world leaders. Philadelphia physician John Redman Coxe, noting that even then false accounts were circulated of negative effects of vaccination, wrote, "Such are the falsehoods which impede the progress of the brightest discovery which has ever been made! But the contest is in vain! Time has drawn aside the veil which obstructed our knowledge of this invaluable blessing; and in the examples of the Emperor of Constantinople, of the Dowager Empress of Russia, and the King of Spain, we may date the downfall of further opposition."John Redman Coxe, Practical Observations on Vaccination, Or, Inoculation for the Cow-pock (1802), p. 125.
Coxe's expectation of an end to opposition to vaccination proved premature, and through much of the nineteenth century, the principles, practices and impact of vaccination were matters of active scientific debate. The principles behind vaccination were not clearly understood until the end of the nineteenth century. The importance of hygiene in the preparation, storage, and administration of vaccines was not always understood or practiced. Reliable statistics on vaccine efficacy and side effects were difficult to obtain before the 1930s.
Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League In the United Kingdom, the Vaccination Act 1853 (16 & 17 Vict. c. 100) required that every child be vaccinated within three or four months of birth. It set a precedent for the state regulation of physical bodies, and was fiercely resisted. The following year, in 1854, John Gibbs published the first anti-compulsory-vaccination pamphlet, Our Medical Liberties. By the 1860s, anti-vaccinationism in Britain was active in the working class, labor aristocracy, and lower middle class. It had become associated with alternative medicine and was part of a larger culture of social and political dissent that included both labor unions and religious dissenters.
In June 1867, the publication "Human Nature" campaigned in the United Kingdom against "The Vaccination Humbug", reporting that many petitions had been presented to Parliament against Compulsory Vaccination for smallpox, including from parents who alleged that their children had died through the procedure, and complaining that these petitions had not been made public. The journal reported the formation of the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League "To overthrow this huge piece of physiological absurdity and medical tyranny", and quoted Richard Gibbs (a cousin of John Gibbs), who ran the Free Hospital at the same address, as stating "I believe we have hundreds of cases here, from being poisoned with vaccination, I deem incurable. One member of a family dating syphilitic symptoms from the time of vaccination, when all the other members of the family have been clear. We strongly advise parents to go to prison, rather than submit to have their helpless offspring inoculated with scrofula, syphilis, and mania".
Notable members of the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League included James Burns, George Dornbusch and Charles Thomas Pearce.Barrow, Logie. (2016). Independent Spirits Spiritualism and English Plebeians, 1850–1910. Routledge. pp. 186–187. After the death of Richard B. Gibbs in 1871, the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League "languished" until 1876 when it was revived under the leadership of Mary Hume-Rothery and the Rev. W. Hume-Rothery. The Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League published the Occasional Circular which later merged into the National Anti-Compulsory Vaccination Reporter.
Anti-Vaccination Society of America In the United States, many states and local school boards established immunization requirements, beginning with a compulsory school vaccination law in Massachusetts in 1855. The Anti-Vaccination Society of America was founded in 1879, after a visit to the United States by British anti-vaccine activist William Tebb, and opposed compulsory smallpox vaccination for smallpox from the final decades of the 19th century through the 1910s. During this period, smallpox vaccination was the only form of vaccination that was widely practiced, and the society published a periodical opposing it, called Vaccination.
A series of American legal cases, beginning in various states and culminating with that of Henning Jacobson of Massachusetts in 1905, upheld the mandating of compulsory smallpox vaccination for the good of the public. The court ruled in Jacobson v. Massachusetts that "the liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint. There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good".
London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination
In 1880, William Tebb enlarged and reorganized the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League in the UK with the formation of the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination, with William Young as secretary. The Vaccination Inquirer, established by Tebb in 1879, was adopted as the official organ of the Society. A series of fourteen "Vaccination Tracts" was begun by Young in 1877 and completed by Garth Wilkinson in 1879. William White was the first editor of the Vaccination Inquirer and after his death in 1885, he was succeeded by Alfred Milnes. Frances Hoggan and her husband authored an article for the Vaccination Inquirer in September 1883 which argued against compulsory vaccination."Frances Hoggan MD 1843–1927" . Breconshire Local & Family History Society (BLFHS) Cymdeithas Hanes Lleol a Theuluoedd Brycheiniog Newsletter 70 – October 2017. The London Society focused on lobbying parliamentary support in the 1880s and early 1890s. They gained support from several members of the House of Commons of which the most prominent was Peter Alfred Taylor, the member for Leicester, which was described as the "Mecca of antivaccination".
The National Anti-Vaccination League The UK movement grew, and as the influence of the London Society overshadowed the Hume-Rotherys and it took the national lead, it was decided in February 1896 to re-form the Society as The National Anti-Vaccination League. Arthur Phelps was elected as president. In 1898, the league took on a school leaver named Lily Loat, who was elected as the league's Secretary by 1909. In 1906, George Bernard Shaw wrote a supportive letter to the National Anti-Vaccination League, equating methods of vaccination with "rubbing the contents of the dustpan into the wound".Yang, Jennifer. (2014). "Contemporary debates on vaccination policies have historical parallels in Ransom Center's collections" . Ransom Center Magazine. Retrieved June 20, 2021.
Anti-Vaccination League of America In 1908, the Anti-Vaccination League of America was created by Charles M. Higgins and industrialist John Pitcairn Jr.,Walloch, Karen L. (2015). The Antivaccine Heresy: Jacobson v. Massachusetts and the Troubled History of Compulsory Vaccination in the United States. University of Rochester Press. pp. 4–5. with anti-vaccination campaigns focused on New York and Pennsylvania. Members were opposed to compulsory vaccination laws.Colgrove, James. (2006). State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in Twentieth-Century America. University of California Press. pp. 52–54. Higgins was the League's chief spokesman and pamphleteer.Altenbaugh, Richard J. (2018). Vaccination in America: Medical Science and Children's Welfare. Palgrave. p. 51. Historian James Colgrove noted that Higgins "attempted to overturn the New York State's law mandating vaccination of students in public schools". The League should not be confused with the Anti-Vaccination Society of America, which was formed in 1879. Higgins was criticized by medical experts for spreading misinformation and ignoring facts as to the efficacy of vaccination. The League dissolved after the death of Higgins in 1929.Colgrove, James. (2006). State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in Twentieth-Century America. University of California Press. p. 74.
20th century
Anti-vaccine activism ebbed for much of the twentieth century, but never completely vanished. In the UK, the National Anti-Vaccination League continued to publish new issues of its journal until 1972, by which time the global campaign for smallpox eradication through vaccination had made the disease so uncommon that compulsory vaccination for smallpox was no longer required in the United Kingdom.
New vaccines were developed and used against diseases such as diphtheria and whooping cough. In the UK, these were often introduced on a voluntary basis, without arousing the same kind of anti-vaccination response that had accompanied compulsory smallpox vaccination.