giving it was that we had reached a point where there were more deaths from the vaccine than from natural smallpox in the population.
In the 12 years between 1948 and 1960, not a single person had died in the US from smallpox, but up to 300 had died from the vaccine, and "countless" more were severely injured by the vaccine.
It was a good thing that smallpox was eradicated. But it wasn't a good thing for the individual families who had lost loved ones from the vaccine. And it's not as if the state of science in the 1800's was anything like it is today.
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1413-81232011000200010&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en
Dr. C. Henry Kempe, the earliest voice questioning the net benefit of routine smallpox vaccination in the ultimately successful movement to discontinue it, was an eminent virologist and pediatrician responsible for the development of an attenuated strain of smallpox vaccine for use on children with eczema, as well as a member of WHO's Expert Committee on Smallpox. He had treated over 10,000 cases of smallpox around the world, a third of which, he said, were fatal12; he could not be accused of naivete regarding the disease's effects. Drs. J. Michael Lane, J. Donald Millar, and John Neff all worked in the Smallpox Unit of the National Communicable Disease Center. Nowhere in the literature do these men challenge the value of vaccines in general, or the right of state and medical establishments to intervene in the bodies of their subjects. On the contrary, they prefaced their objections to routine smallpox vaccination in the U.S. with praise for the practice in other contexts: in raising the issue, Kempe noted that "[s]mallpox vaccination on a worldwide scale continues to be of infinite importance as a public health measure," and was careful to acknowledge that "there is little doubt that universal vaccination has stamped out smallpox in this country"13. Kempe and the others objected to routine smallpox vaccination not on the basis of a broader political or philosophical principle, but only on the basis of the vaccine's biomedical danger to the general U.S. population, which due to unique historical circumstances they felt now outweighed its biomedical benefit.
In 1960, Kempe gave an address presenting his concerns about the problematic side effects of smallpox vaccination, including mortality and significant morbidity13. He greatly expanded on the implications of these concerns in two 1965 articles published in prominent medical journals. In these, Kempe first proposed that the practice of routine smallpox vaccination in childhood was no longer justifiable. He felt that the vaccine's rate of serious complications was unacceptable in a population with a negligible risk of ever encountering the disease it protected against: since 1948, he noted, not a single person in the U.S. had died of smallpox, whereas he estimated that in this same time period 200-300 individuals had died as a direct consequence of the vaccination, with countless more suffering severe though non-fatal side effects12. Kempe found little support among his colleagues at this time: in a discussion section appended to his proposal in Pediatrics, Dr. Samuel Katz charged that "Dr. Kempe has opened Pandora's box deliberately," while Dr. Joel Alpert was anxious to "avoid the headline tomorrow morning that will say 'Pediatricians against vaccination.'" With few exceptions, Katz seemed to sum up the general reaction in his assertion that "I do not believe that many of us are prepared to go along with you in abandoning what we now have"13. Time magazine was more receptive to Kempe's ideas than were many of his fellow pediatricians: in two articles entitled "The two faces of smallpox" and "Eczema and vaccination," the magazine devoted a significant amount of space to Kempe's ideas, quoting his projected figures at length and without rebuttal14,15.
SNIP
This episode contributes to an interesting portrait of the polymorphous nature of anti-vaccinationism in U.S. history. Though historically opposition to vaccination has often been associated with countercultural challenges to the hegemony of the biomedical state, discontinuance of routine smallpox vaccination, as this article has sought to demonstrate, was agitated for and realized within a framework of biomedical authority and scientific legitimization. Indeed, opposition to vaccination has been, and continues to be, a complex issue with a remarkable ability to draw support from a wide range of political orientations and ideologies.
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She said her mother never got over it.
