Opposition to vaccination goes back about three centuries, the autism non-sense is just a recent version of an old phenomenon. It isn’t just limited to the US either, polio vaccination people have been killed in Pakistan.
So, what are the factors which make vaccination prone to being opposed not just now in the US but more generally?
Three centuries?? Impressive, when the first vaccination was done only a bit over two centuries ago.
they were so against it they were a century before they had to be.
Because you’re allowing yourself to be injected with viruses, and chemicals. Jesus, man! That can’t be good for anyone!
The Bundaberg disaster (1928): http://www.halenet.com.au/~jvbryant/Bundseru.html
It was caused by contaminated diphtheria serum.
The Cutter Incident (1955): http://www.amazon.com/The-Cutter-Incident-Americas-Vaccine/dp/0300126050
And there are other incidents, too, and don’t forget about Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy, whose son isn’t autistic.
It plays into the age old fears of the “government” (or anyone in authority) doing “things” to you that are harmful. The problem is, some governments/authorities have done harmful things, on purpose, to their own people, so the fear is rooted in some truths. People hurting and “betwitching” children is a common enough trope in fairy tales and myths to be a pretty universal fear. There is also a generalized mistrust of science, as being devoid of humanity and lacking an ethical framework. So one could envision a “mad scientist” gleefully shooting up toxins into babies to see what happens.
Our pediatrician once told us that one of the problems with vaccines is they happen around the time babies take significant, outward developmental jumps. We may not know anything is wrong with little Susie at 2 mos, since we don’t require a 2 mos to do much to be considered developmentally on track. They get their 6 month shot and all of sudden it appears they aren’t progressing normally- because the criteria for normal development is much higher at that point. If the child “suddenly” stops progressing, it looks like there is a causal link to the vaccine they just got. People’s inability to make dispassionate conclusions about something that happens close to them factors in.
People have short memories. It’s because of vaccines that measles, polio, whopping cough, tetanus, tuberculosis and diphtheria are all pretty much under control, at least in the first world that people forget that those diseases were pretty nasty.
My mother survived polio as a child and suffered the rest of her life with post-polio syndrome. My father lost a sister to whopping cough. But both of these cases were something like 70-80 years ago. Unless the threat is clear and present, people tend to get nonchalant about such things.
“One of the first documented ideas of vaccinations was in 1721 when Reverend Cotton Mather introduced inoculation to Boston, Massachusetts during the 1721 smallpox epidemic”
Alright, broaden my question to inoculation rather than just vaccination, then. Or did you have nothing to add beyond pedantry?
I think that a lot of it is also that it is a victim of its own success. People don’t see the diseases as much and think that they are permanently gone so why should they risk the small chance of an adverse response? People also complain about the side effects of vaccinations (my arm was sore, I had an increased temp) and think that they actually got sick when they are often just the body having an immune system response.
I’m on a board with lots of anti-vaxxers and one interesting thing is many of them do get the pertussis vaccine. Why? Because they’ve actually seen whooping cough or known someone who had it. Many of the ones who don’t get it are the ones who haven’t seen it.
It was believed that the old pertussis vaccine caused brain damage in a small percentage of children who took it, and that the tendency appeared to run in families. It has since been discovered that these children had a genetic error of sodium metabolism in the brain, and would have become disabled anyway.
Early vaccination was dangerous. You had a cure that had a one percent fatality rate for a disease that had a twenty percent fatality rate. The numbers told you the cure was a good idea overall but it was undeniable some people who wouldn’t have died from the disease died from the cure.
Science has marched on. Modern vaccines do not pose any significant danger as long as they’re handled correctly. But the idea that vaccination is a risk got stuck in people’s minds and has stayed there long after it was no longer real. And vaccinations have been hurt by their own success - they’ve eradicated diseases so completely, people now ignore the danger those diseases represent.
It also feels really wrong to sign your baby up for pain. When my boy got his two month shots. . . oh my. The look of shock and horror and confusion on his face was just devastating. And of course they don’t understand and can’t understand and they turn to you for comfort not knowing that you signed them up for this. It’s just awful, emotionally, especially when they are really, really little. Bigger babies can self-soothe, can be distracted, can move on. Infants are entirely in the NOW, and for just a second the now is PAIN. It’s hard to watch.
So I can see feeling like “This can’t be right. It just can’t be”. But I know it is, so we certainly vaccinate on schedule.
I doubt any of the aforementioned “incidents” have had much to do with loud but fringe opposition to immunization that has been with us for hundreds of years. People understand that no human endeavor (including many medical advances) comes without the potential for error. Thyroid surgery used to be pretty much a coin flip as to whether you’d live or die up until a little more than a century ago. But we don’t have a continued anti-thyroid surgery movement.
Historic factors behind the antivax movement include opposition to government mandates/libertarian impulses, fear of introducing “foreign” substances into the body, and needle phobia.* More recently, people’s dread of “toxins”, the growth of conspiracy theories and correlation/causation confusion have kept antivax sentiment ticking along.
*“You killed him, with that needle thing! And not even tell us beforehand, so we could call the priest!” - Angry parent whose moribund child was unsuccessfully treated with diphtheria antitoxin, in Sinclair Lewis’ “Arrowsmith”.
I was genuinely confused as to whether your “three centuries” statement was intentional or a typo of some sort. Clarity achieved. Carry on.
The ill-conceived plan to smoke out bin Laden through a vaccination campaign provided an excuse for radical Islamists to attack vaccination workers, but it’s far from the only reason for their behavior.
Muslim antivax sentiment* is not limited to CIA involvement or even generalized hostility and suspicion towards the West, but also aligns with paranoia and pseudoscience very similar to that promulgated by non-Muslim antivaxers.
“In Islam, the human body is holy. We should protect and keep it natural, pure, healthy and safe. As vaccines are neither pure nor natural, it is no wonder that science and medicine have found them to be so incredibly dangerous. A well-orchestrated pharmaceutical industry plan of scaremongering exists to create fear in parents who do not vaccinate their children. Doctors and governments have been indoctrinated and corrupted by a gigantic and incredibly powerful industry into advocating obligatory vaccination, contrary to health and human and religious rights.”
*to be fair, many Islamic physicians and health care workers promote immunization’s value and try to educate people on the subject.
Almost all other medical procedures are carried out on people who are already ill. It’s a hell of a lot easier to accept as reasonable that someone who had a disease died due to an unsuccessful attempt at a cure than to accept that an apparently totally healthy child died or was damaged due to a medical procedure that was supposed to stop them getting ill.
Even with vaccines as safe as the ones we use now, there’s still occasional bad reactions or allergies, which are dispropotionally reported, plus the common minor side effects make some people suspiscious, so they look extra hard for evidence of serious side effects (it’s clearly doing something, right?).
It’s still fairly dangerous, and fortunately is much less frequently necessary than it was a century ago, thanks to the iodination of salt.
That was David Letterman’s mom’s cause celebre, because she remembered lots of people in Indiana who had goiters and other health problems due to iodine deficiency early in life. Salt is the one food product that everyone on earth uses, and a penny’s worth of iodine will fortify a ton of edible salt. 
I wish more mothers knew that you can nurse a baby when they get shots. Nursing can help them feel much better. We’ve been lucky with peds who are quick with the needles.
To answer the OP, IMO as the co-author of a book on this subject, I think the net is a huge contributor to modern day opposition. Bad info is incredibly easy to find. Every single time this subject comes up on the net, the nutters come out to play.
Oh look. There’s someone who links to the Age of Autism. And the article is just filled with links that look soooo scientific! Or the National Vaccine Information Center. It all initially looks so credible. And it does. Hell, I’ve been taken in. At one point I was writing the book and it was late at night and I googled the hib vaccine. I looked through a few links and then read NVIC by accident. And it looked so convincing. I thought HOW THE HELL COULD I HAVE GIVEN MY BABY THE FUCKING HIB VACCINE. And then I realized it was NVIC and I realized it was, of course, bullshit.
And on some level it all sort of makes sense. Because the pharm companies really do suck. They really do all kinds of shitty things. They lie all the time. They produce products that are not particularly great and they have done all kinds of lousy things in the past. And then you think hey the diseases don’t sound so bad. I had chicken pox when I was a kid and I was fine. Okay it was two weeks of misery but hey I didn’t die. And then it all looks like it sort of makes sense. I mean the disease is mild so why the hell do we need the shot?
Why is there so much more autism now then in the past? Why do children have higher rates of asthma now? Why do we give the hep b vaccine when some other countries do not? Oh look. Katie Couric just did a show implying the Gardasil vaccine is dangerous!
I have spent years of my life probably attempting to answer these questions. I have answered them over and over and over again after gathering the answers.
IMO, there’s a hardcore group of nuts you can never convince. I have argued with Cynthia Parker. She’s a complete jerk who is convinced that she has MS and her daughter has autism from vaccines. It doesn’t matter that many other people have and myself have spend quite a lot time pointing out just where she’s wrong. She is wrong and she’s going to post on the net and post and post and post. The same with a handful of others like Marcus Heinze and the morons who are regulars on Age of Autism and the Mothering forums.
Then there are the fence sitters. Their minds can be changed. I have had some success with such people. Unfortunately, it can take an actual case of pertussis in one of their children to convince them that the freaking vaccine was a better idea. An actual case of their poor baby coughing brutally and turning blue and oh shit what the fuck have I done sort of thing.
Then there’s the vast majority of people. They vaccinate but they wonder sometimes. They read some of the nonsense and they know it is nonsense. The problem is that it looks convincing and they’re understandably not sure why. The real issue IMO is making sure they understand why the nutters are the nutters. That’s why I co-wrote the book: to put what I’ve learned in a single place. Those are the people the people who really do know about this subject should attempt to reach. We’re really lucky they’re in the majority.
I can think of at least a half dozen people I grew up with in the 1970s who I now believe were on the autistic spectrum. One of them was a boy with very severe behavior problems who was sent away to a state facility, and we were told that he had “childhood schizophrenia”, which was one term for misdiagnosed autism. My neighbor’s boyfriend, who’s in his 50s, has Asperger Syndrome, and in his case, I figured it out the first time I met him because it’s that obvious. He was just considered something of an oddball until Asperger’s was recognized for what it is, and he pursued and got a diagnosis.
I also knew a woman whose son had the “classical” autism, where a child appears to be totally normal until age 2 1/2 and then totally regresses. He lived in a state facility hundreds of miles away, and she never visited him because it was just too painful for her. 
His father, her first husband, lived nearby and did see him regularly and kept her updated on how he was doing. (She said many times that this was NOT why they got divorced; it actually would have happened sooner if they had not had a disabled child.) We can’t blame modern vaccines or environmental toxins for this because if he’s still alive, he would be in his 60s, and she herself died several years ago at the age of 86. BTW, he has a half-brother by his father’s second marriage who is on the spectrum himself, and she told me that he was working on a Ph.D. (this was in the late 1990s) but had never had a job and probably never would because he just didn’t have the social skills to function in the working world.