AS early as the 18th century, movement against vaccination were already being formed. It began with Jenner and his cowpox vaccination, which first became compulsory in Britain. The issue was reduced to vaccination as a cure that was beastly. The other concerns were developed from some religious groups protesting the use of non-human elements being incorporated into the human body.
There is nothing new therefore or “American” about the present refusal of a significant sector of communities in the United States to be vaccinated. And the vehement emotions against the procedure is not simply about its medical aspect.
In the syllabus on the course, Cultural Perspectives on Vaccination, Travis Chi Wing Lau talks of this “cultural panic,” which was, by mid-century, about the “refusal of vaccination as a citizen’s right and widely deployed gothic rhetoric as a powerful scare tactic.”
For the academic, vaccination “has always been not only a medical procedure but a set of images, ideologies, and intentions bound up with nationhood and futurity.”
It is interesting to point out the other details about the syllabus, how it draws together the work of historians and philosophers of science and medicine, literary critics, and medical professionals in a field of study.
While it is easier to understand underdeveloping countries facing massive refusal from its citizens to participate in any mass vaccination programs, the case of anti-vaccination ideologies in a wealthy state like those in the US is a curiosity.
An online material labeled The History of Medicine. An educational resource by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, explains public opinions around vaccination as formed by the tension between divergent cultural viewpoints and value systems. The same document mentions main cultural perspectives on vaccination, clustering around the following: (1) individual rights and public health stances toward vaccination, (2) various religious standpoints and vaccine objections, and (3) suspicion and mistrust of vaccines among different US and global cultures and communities.
Generally, the problem arises when immunizations are mandated by law, in which case, as the material says, the tension between protecting individual liberties and safeguarding the health of the public clashes. In the US, there are laws apparently that require children to be immunized in order to be able to attend school.
The document mentions the landmark case more than 100 years ago, in a case known as Jacobson versus Massachusetts, where a resident of Cambridge refused a smallpox vaccination on the ground that the law on immunization violated his right to care for his own body. The case reached the Supreme Court, which, in turn, favored the State. This decision made in 1905, according to the paper, is “the foundation for state actions to limit individual liberties in order to protect the public’s health.”
The document also talks about how religion impacts attitude to vaccination. An ethical dilemma enters the picture when certain religious groups begin to question chemicals or tissues derived from animals and injected into the body. There are also fundamentalist groups that affirm strongly their belief that only God can heal their body.
There is a section in the document, which deals with communities or even countries that develop suspicion and mistrust of vaccines.
Some inhabitants in areas in Africa and Asia, the document tells us, explain their doubt as to efficacy and necessity of vaccines in terms of a ploy to slowly introduce an affliction, instead of a cure. The notion of the West out to destroy a certain part of a population is one easy way to explain this phenomenon of mistrust. Vaccines are seen as having grave and serious effect on the sterility of women, usually, and sometimes, men. In the recent past, there were talks—rumors, speculations, impression—that certain vaccines could impair the mental health of children.
While in many of the conditions cited, a proactive community was engaged, the colonial history of immunization in the Philippines did not show the people possessing the freedom to respond to the intervention acted out by the colonial health officials.
There is a book that examines the introduction of immunization by the colonial administrators to the Philippines. This was Warwick Anderson’s Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines.
One of the early findings of the American physicians was what they perceived to be the Filipino’s immunity to many tropical diseases. This immunity, which was described as partial, made the “native” the carriers of the disease, which caused the Americans’ vulnerability to the disease.
The medical findings also expounded on an aspect that would color the American conceptualization of the new colony, its sanitation. The Philippines was dirty and it needed cleaning. Sanitizing the Filipino, according to the colonial administrator, was looking not only at their environment but also their body.
In this health protocol, the conquest of the land became the conquest of the physical body.
To conquer the disease, the health officials had to educate the indigene and tell them how “dysentery, typhoid fever, cholera, and kindred diseases are conveyed to a person, regardless of whether he be king or peasant, with minute organisms that, probably, have passed through the bowels of another person.”
Colonizing the native meant educating them into the American standard of hygiene and sanitation.
The parks and plazas had to be swept of dirt and grimes. The homes should have toilets. Food must be clean. The source of water should be pure. All this in the name of health education and colonization.
Anderson redefines colonization pathologically: “Colonial public health, as it emerged in the Philippines under the American regime, would come to share both logic and grammar with the military sanitary bureau. That is, the mode of action and disciplinary tactics employed by military surgeons to ensure the hygiene and propriety of white troops were invoked, toward the end of the war, to manage the civilian population of the archipelago.”
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