Opposition to vaccines in the United States and around the world was a fringe view for a very long time, but it’s not anymore now, thanks to people like Donald Trump and his Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr.
While this type of thinking has proliferated in the age of social media, in fact, being anti-vax is as old as the vaccines themselves. It’s a history worth exploring and knowing about, not just so that you can have better arguments for why vaccines work, but also so that you can understand that the arguments against inoculations are basically unchanged since the early 18th century when they became commonplace in the West.
Thomas Levenson, my guest in today’s episode, has written a very fascinating history of vaccines called A Pox on Fools, that is the focus of our discussion today. He’s a professor of science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’s also the author of several other books, including Einstein in Berlin and Newton and the Counterfeiter.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction07:01 — Inoculation is a ‘newfangled’ idea that is three centuries old13:16 — Vaccine opposition as a form of eugenics19:10 — Cotton Mather’s Christian argument for inoculation25:14 — Vaccines are a political technology, because they cannot work without it33:26 — Nazi ‘Deutsche Physik’ and Russian Lysenkoism39:30 — How the pro-science consensus was built in the postwar U.S.53:31 — Business leaders uniformly agreed on the necessity of science as a civic culture
Related Content
—Why science and democracy need each other
—Robert Kennedy’s MAHA cult is making America sicker
—How the sex and drugs counterculture fell in love with Donald Trump and Jesus
—Study: Disinformation belief is more about defying societal norms than preferring incorrect views
—RFK Junior and the naturalistic fallacy at the heart of the pseudo-scientific medical industry
—How Republicans are making the internet a safe space for misinformation
—Uncertainty makes science powerful — and incredibly vulnerable
About the Show
Theory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.
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