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Small Pox & How the Anti-Vax Movement Started - - - Many do not know that the anti-vaccination movement originated with the smallpox vaccine, due to the vaccine frequently failing to prevent smallpox and severely injuring many recipients. When the smallpox vaccine was administered, it would often cause a significant inflammatory skin reaction. The medical field observed that those who the vaccine failed to protect had also not developed the characteristic skin eruption. As such, they adopted the stance that if the vaccine “did not take,” it needed to be reapplied until the skin eruption happened. In contrast, dissident physicians concluded the skin reaction was a proxy for a functioning immune system, so those where “it didn’t take” were the same people who were likely to become severely ill from smallpox (hence making vaccination pointless). A case can be made that this issue applies to many other vaccines too. Furthermore, once the vaccine was deployed, many highly unusual neurological injuries occurred in those where the vaccine “did not take,” causing observers to conclude a lack of vitality had allowed the vaccine to “go inward” and then cause much worse chronic issues. One of the biggest problems with the smallpox vaccine was that vaccination tended to increase rather than decrease the occurrence of smallpox. When this happened, the government tended to respond to that emergency by viewing it as a result of not enough people being vaccinated and doing what they could to increase vaccination rates. Since people were becoming aware of both the dangers of the smallpox vaccine and its ineffectiveness, the government had to try to implement harsher and harsher mandates needed to continue meeting the vaccination quotas. Sounds very similar to what we all went through during Covid, right? But history shows how our ancestors weren't the pushovers that so many are now, because as things continued to escalate, assaults on officers enforcing vaccination occurred, and riots broke out. This 1874 quote from Emeritus Professor F. W. Newman encapsulates the mood of the time: “Decorous and admissible language fails me, in alluding to that which might have seemed incredible thirty years ago - the commanding of vaccination on a second child of a family, when vaccination has killed the first; and then sending the father to prison for refusal.” To address the widespread failures of their vaccine, the medical profession moved their goal-posts from the vaccine providing a lifelong “perfect” immunity to simply ensuring a “milder disease,” a playbook that persists to this day and just like we all witnessed them do again with the COVID-19 vaccines. After decades of work, people were able to improve the basic living conditions through clean water & public sanitation efforts which resulted in the reduction of deaths from all infectious diseases. But the medical profession coopted these efforts and claimed the reduction in deaths was due to the introduction of vaccination. Since this time, the belief that medicine rescued us from the dark ages of infectious illness and that all infections can be prevented with a vaccination has become one of the central mythologies the practice of modern medicine is founded upon. In 1972, the United States decided the risk of the vaccine's side effects was greater than the risk of contracting the disease, and so we stopped routine vaccination for smallpox.