Anti-vaxxers continue to find an audience. They always have

Thousands of academics gather in Vancouver for the annual Humanities and Social Science Congress from June 1-7. They will feature articles on everything from child marriage in Canada to why dodgeball is a problem. In his Oh, the humanities! National series, the National Post presents some of the most interesting research.

It's a delicate moment to be an anti-vaxxer.

Measles is in the air, literally and figuratively. Doctors recommend reminders for adults who are not old enough to suffer as a child, which gives them immunity for life. Epidemics abound in schools, hospitals, hotels and restaurants in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Edmonton. There is a cluster in a New Brunswick high school and a warning to people who have visited an emergency room.

In America, where measles was officially declared eliminated 20 years ago, more than half of the states have active outbreaks, including the most densely populated areas of southern California and the northeastern shoreline. The number of cases is by far the highest since 1994, when the number was increased from its historic low of 1993, following a major epidemic at a Christian Science, Missouri, boarding school. students had not accepted vaccines for religious reasons.

Normally, the discourse on vaccines is punctuated each year and the information on the science of vaccination. It follows the flu season, dominated for the most part by a tone of sober paternalism. Measles is a disease that we do not hear much about, except in the context of vaccinations. In the public imagination, he lost his momentum.

There has been opposition to vaccination since it became a practice in the late 18th century

This epidemic disrupted that. Now people are panicking and we talk about vaccination as a moral duty, like driving sober. It is tempting to view this mood change as a devastating rebuke against the Internet's favorite pseudoscientists, the Gwyneth Paltrows of Epidemiology, still whistling on mercury, formaldehyde and alcohol. 39; other artificial chemicals.

But anti-vaxxers have the knack for rolling with punch and turning negative proofs into positives. This is how Andrew Wakefield, the former charismatic and shameful doctor, claimed to have fraudulently claimed that there was a link between autism and the measles virus, mumps and rubella, organizing rallies and saying in the newspapers that the vaccines had boosted measles.

Despite all the discordant criticisms, these people continue to find a credulous audience. Wakefield's false relationship with autism 20 years ago is widely regarded as the trigger for the current movement against immunization. But the fear that he evoked was less a cause than a catalyst for historical movements dating back to the 18th century, when the first effective vaccine was deployed against smallpox.

This is the opinion of Heather MacDougall, a medical historian at the University of Waterloo, who is researching the history of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in Canada.

"Vaccination has been opposed since it became common practice in the late eighteenth century," she said in an interview before her presentation on the subject before the Congress of Science. in Vancouver.

What she discovered was that anti-vaxxers have always been with us, they just changed. In Canada, this story is better told by the measles vaccine, from the nationalist campaign to create a Canadian version instead of being bought in the United States in the 1960s, to the changing cultural pressures of motherhood and the rise of back to earth, anti-medicine pseudo-naturalism in the 1970s.

Today's anti-vaxxers are less anti-cultural and more middle-clbad and often reflect a feminist shift in health care, as MacDougal describes it, in that they are often wealthy, educated women, full of resources, who have been urged all their lives to control their own health, to think critically, to research and apply their own conclusions about risk.

In Canada, this story is superimposed on nationalism around health insurance and Quebec nationalism around sovereignty. There was a recurring tension about whether immunization would become an integral part of health management or an emergency measure for managing epidemics.

When the MMR vaccine became available, in the 1960s, British Columbia and Alberta used public health clinics equipped with nurses to immunize babies brought in by their parents, usually mothers. In Ontario, it was mainly done by a general practitioner and in Quebec, you had the choice, you could go to a public health clinic or to your family doctor. But all over the world, women started to work more and therefore were less able than before to go to day clinics.

"It's not that people are negative about vaccinating their children, it's that access is becoming a problem, so there's a cost," said MacDougall.

Medicare has changed this dynamic by relieving some cost pressures. The culture was different too. It was the age of the space. Technology was the answer. He had defeated smallpox and polio. The measles came next.

Anti-vaxxers have the knack for turning negative evidence into positive

The effort has been largely successful. In the 1980s, when Ontario pbaded legislation requiring schoolchildren to be immunized, even health professionals lost the sense of urgency. The measles vaccine worked so well that many did not even see the disease.

This legislation led to the creation of the Canadian Vaccination Committee, which challenged the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which aimed to protect human security. They wanted a conscientious objector clause, like the one in Britain on smallpox vaccine. As a result, the Ontario Ministry of Health authorized a "philosophical objection", neither religious nor medical.

MacDougall's research also describes how the CCAV disappeared when his secretary, motivated by the belief that his child had been injured by a vaccine, moved to British Columbia to create the Vaccine Resistance Awareness Network. Later became Vaccine Choice Canada, which is now the country's largest anti-vaccination group.

"If you take a long-term view, you'll see different reasons for the lack of immunization," said MacDougall.

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