Grifters, cynics, and true believers: The family tree of vaccine opponents
摘要
该文章探讨了反疫苗群体的分类及其历史渊源。文章指出，反疫苗言论并非新鲜事物，而是与疫苗本身相伴而生。作者托马斯·莱文森在其新书中将反疫苗者分为三类：真正的信徒、骗子和愤世嫉俗者。文章回顾了18世纪西方从奥斯曼妇女和非洲奴隶那里学习天花接种的历史，并指出在19世纪，约40%的婴儿在5岁前死于感染。
Stanley Plotkin, 93, was instrumental in developing a number of vaccines over the course of his career. He recently said that he’s “beginning to regret having lived so long—because we’re going downhill.” How could we possibly have gotten here?
Maybe we’ve always been here. It turns out that the anti-vaccine arguments currently flooding the Internet have been around for as long as vaccines have. In his new book A Pox on Fools, Thomas Levenson breaks them down into three categories, as made clear in the book’s subtitle: “The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines.” The accusations these people levy against vaccines can just as easily be used to categorize the arguments themselves: They are wrong, they are bad, and they are intolerable.
Wrong
As Levenson tells it, in the early 18th century, a couple of forward-thinking Westerners learned about inoculations against smallpox from Ottoman women and an enslaved African. At that point, infectious disease was by far the leading cause of death, as it had been forever. In the 19th century, roughly 40 percent of babies died of infection before they turned 5.
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