Ever since Edward Jenner performed the first vaccination in 1796 the very idea of using a disease to fight disease has been extremely controversial. Jenner had noticed that the young milk maidens who got cowpox on their hands never seemed to get the much more dangerous smallpox. To test this idea he deliberately inoculated a young boy named James Phipps with cowpox to see if he would become immune to smallpox. It worked but Jenner’s experimenting on a human being, risking a young boy’s life upset many people.
In the 230 years that followed vaccines had their ups and downs. Inoculations seemed to be effective against some diseases like smallpox, even though sometimes the vaccine could cause the patient to catch the disease instead of becoming immune to it. For some other diseases, like syphilis for example, vaccinations appeared to have no effect. At the same time methods for preparing vaccines where anything but standard, since no one knew how vaccines actually worked, no one really knew how to prepare a good vaccine.
It wasn’t until 1955 that Jonas Salk succeeded in developing a vaccine for polio and in doing so he established a strong methodology for the creation of vaccines. What Salk did was to first isolate the poliovirus; viruses themselves had only been discovered 24 years earlier. Then he grew large amounts of the polio virus in chicken eggs before killing the virus with formaldehyde. By injecting the dead virus into a human being that person’s immune system would then develop antibodies to fight polio without any risk of that person actually catching polio.
I can still remember the campaigns in the early 1960s to get everyone vaccinated against polio. I was vaccinated, as was every member of my family. The vaccine worked so well that now the terrible disease of polio is all but non-existent in the United States. In the years that followed vaccines became a public health policy that every citizen was expected to follow and which did in fact greatly improve the health of the country as a whole.
Nevertheless, there were still many people who felt that injecting a disease, even a dead disease into a healthy person was simply wrong and there was just no arguing with them. At the same time there are a small number of people who are just so scared of needles, or who simply can’t be bothered to get the vaccine. Because of these people there is still the occasional case of polio in the US.
The success of the polio vaccine was followed up by vaccines for such diseases as measles, mumps and rubella, the so-called MMR vaccine, which unfortunately for me was only developed after I had gotten all three diseases. At the same time vaccines were developed for influenza, but because that disease mutates so rapidly it turned out that a new flu shot is needed every year.
There were still problems however; occasionally a person might have an allergic reaction to a vaccine, especially if they are allergic to eggs. This is what happened with the swine flu vaccine in 1975. Also, for some infectious diseases a vaccine simply could not be found, that’s true of the HIV virus that causes AIDS. These rare problems were ammunition for the anti-vaccination minority that continued to claim their right to freedom of choice, in other words their right to get sick and possibly infect others.
Then starting in the 1990s there were stories about how the MMR vaccine caused autism, the anti-vaxers pointing to an article by British physician Andrew Wakefield, an article that has since been declared fraudulent. Wakefield it was discovered, was pushing his own formula for a measles vaccine, so claiming that MMR had problems was in his financial interest. Nevertheless the new Internet had created a fertile field for conspiracies and the anti-vaxers keep the myth going that MMR caused autism. A myth that has been gaining strength ever since.
Things have gone so badly that President Trump, in his infinite insanity, has seen fit to put an anti-vaxer, Robert F. Kennedy jr., in charge of our nation’s health services as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy is not just an anti-vaxer, he distrusts the medical establishment in general, preferring healthy eating and exercise to a doctor’s care. Never mind the fact that the medical establishment itself recommends healthy eating and exercise. While some of Kennedy’s ideas are sound many of his ideas however verge on psuedo-science.
As a part of his campaign to “Make America Healthy Again” or MAHA Kennedy has advised pregnant woman to not take Tylenol for their pain, encouraged people to eat more red meat as well as working to make childhood vaccinations ‘optional’. At the same time he has withdrawn the US from international medical organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) while firing legitimate medical researchers at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and replacing them with his own handpicked anti-medical establishment followers.
The results of all these upheavals is clear to see, in 2025 the state of Texas saw the largest outbreak of Measles in the US since 1990, only to be surpassed in 2026 by an outbreak in South Carolina. In both outbreaks over 90% of those infected were unvaccinated. In the last two years the US has now seen more cases of measles than it had seen in the years 2000-2024 combined, and remember 2026 isn’t over yet!
Meanwhile the Trump administration’s attitude towards vaccines has also led to a decline in the number of people getting their yearly flu shot, a result of which is an abnormally high number of people coming down with the flu. Over 18 million cases were recorded this past flu season with 230,000 hospitalizations and close to 10,000 deaths. Will things continue to get worse? Only time will tell. However, so long as pseudo-science and conspiracy theories are given credence in the halls of government the basic health of the people of the United States is in great danger.