May 11, 2021 at 6:00 am
As vaccines to protect people from COVID-19 started becoming available in late 2020, the rhetoric of anti-vaccine groups intensified. Efforts to keep vaccines out of arms reinforce misinformation about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines and spread disinformation deliberately misleading people for political, ideological or other reasons.
Vaccines have been met with suspicion and hostility for as long as they have existed. Current opposition to COVID-19 vaccines is just the latest chapter in this long story. The primary driver of vaccine hesitancy throughout history has not been money, selfishness or ignorance.
“Vaccine hesitancy has less to do with misunderstanding the science and more to do with general mistrust of scientific institutions and government,” says Maya Goldenberg, a philosophy expert at the University of Guelph, Ontario, who studies the phenomenon. Historically, people harmed or oppressed by such institutions are the ones most l
April 28, 2021
An 1802 engraving shows a doctor, possibly Edward Jenner, with a “victim” of his vaccine. They are surrounded by the already vaccinated, who exhibit some worrying cow-related side effects.Credit.James Gillray, via Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images, via Getty Images
By David Motadel
Mr. Motadel is a historian at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
LONDON Almost 14 months into the coronavirus pandemic, vaccines are, for most of us, the key to getting out of lockdown and returning to lives that we recognize. And with more than a billion doses administered worldwide, there are reasons for hope even if that hope is not spread evenly.
Dr. Edward Jenner performing his first smallpox vaccination on James Phipps, an eight-year-old boy. May 14, 1796.
Jan. 28 With just 15 million Americans having been administered vaccine against COVID-19 to this date and far, far fewer even in many developed countries the success of the COVID-19 vaccination drive depends on more than production and distribution rates and public health systems. It also needs what seems, in the United States, to be a scarce virtue among its citizens: commitment to the General Welfare.
The words are capitalized in the great Preamble to the United States Constitution as one of the primary concerns of “We, the People.” No disease is or has been