← Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)16. Juni · 1 Std. 02 Min.

Antivax arguments haven’t gotten any better in 300 years

Antivax arguments haven’t gotten any better in 300 years16. Juni1 Std. 02 Min.

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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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The video of this conversation is available. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

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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