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Vaccine hesitancy: old story, same mistakes

2021; UNIVERSIDADE DO ESTADO DE MATO GROSSO; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.30681/252610105876

2526-1010

Natalia Pasternak Tashner,

Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy

Fear of vaccines is as old as vaccines themselves.Even before Jenner and the smallpox vaccine, people had their questions and concerns about the empirical immunization programs of the time.Back then, inoculating someone with secretions from the pustules of a smallpox patient was already a common practice, but not taken up willingly by many.The book "The great inoculator: the untold story of Daniel Sutton and his medical revolutions" by Gavin Weightman, gives us a good idea of how the concept of inoculation, and getting someone immunized, was viewed in the 18th century, in a pre-Jenner era 1 .Back then, smallpox was a deadly, feared disease.The death toll was high, with a mortality rate of around 30%, and those who survived were literally scarred for life.Some went blind from the disease.Inoculation was not really a new idea, there are reports of "variolation" -the habit of scraping smallpox pustules from contaminated people and inoculating healthy people with the material -from China since the year 1000.It became regular practice in parts of Asia in the 1600s, and was brought to England by Lady Mary Montagu 2 .Lady Mary's ideas were met with great criticism.She had, after all, brought these ideas from Turkey, so there was both religious and sexist prejudice: the method was being proposed by a woman, and had non-Christian origins.