vaccine opponents’ – A new book revisits how anti-vaccine arguments—and the people behind them—appeared almost as soon as inoculation spread for smallpox. From moral backlash framed as divine will to deliberate profiteering and hardened skepticism, Thomas Levenson maps a family tr
Stanley Plotkin, 93, helped develop vaccines across decades of work. In recent remarks. he said he’s “beginning to regret having lived so long—because we’re going downhill.” The question that follows isn’t philosophical. It’s immediate: how did the conversation get twisted so completely that progress can feel like it’s slipping away?.
Thomas Levenson’s new book. *A Pox on Fools*. offers a way to look at the anti-vaccine wave without treating it as a modern anomaly. The subtitle does the heavy lifting: “The True Believers. Grifters. and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines.” Levenson breaks vaccine opponents into three categories—and shows that the claims they make against vaccines have been around since vaccines themselves were first introduced.
The stories are old, but the structure feels familiar: what opponents say is “wrong,” what they insist is “bad,” and what they brand as “intolerable.” Levenson returns to smallpox inoculation in the early 1700s, when infectious disease was, as it had been for generations, the leading cause of death.
In the early 18th century. a couple of forward-thinking Westerners learned about inoculations against smallpox from Ottoman women and an enslaved African. Levenson lays out the stakes in plain numbers and plain scale: in the 19th century. roughly 40 percent of babies died of infection before they turned 5. Childhood survival mattered in a way that’s easy to forget when the risk has been pushed out of everyday life.
When smallpox epidemics broke out in London and Boston in 1721. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Cotton Mather began inoculation campaigns in their respective cities. The method was specific and startlingly physical. Inoculation involved taking pus from a pock of someone with a not-very-severe case of smallpox. making a cut in the arm of the person being inoculated. and rubbing the pus into the cut.
Then came the backlash—fast enough that it reads less like disagreement and more like reflex. Some argued inoculation was morally wrong because it interfered with divine ordination. The claim was that only God could decide who would sicken and die and who would not. and that trying to interfere was to defy God’s will. In Levenson’s telling, the accusations weren’t just medical; they carried religious language sharp enough to cut. It was framed as hubris and blasphemy.
Under that moral argument sat an even darker premise: contracting a highly infectious disease was divine punishment for sin, and the only way to avoid disease was to live a virtuous life. The logic was tidy. The world, when it went wrong, proved you deserved it. When it went better, it rewarded you.
A pattern emerges across time in how opposition hardens around meaning as much as meaninglessness—do the wrong thing and you invite harm. do the right thing and you avoid it. even if the “right thing” is not what keeps people alive. Levenson’s framing of vaccine opponents into “True Believers. Grifters. and Cynics” starts to feel less like a taxonomy and more like a warning about how arguments propagate: some people may be acting from conviction. some from profit. and some from a refusal to be moved. but the claims attach themselves to the idea that disease is a moral verdict.
Plotkin’s regret—“beginning to regret having lived so long—because we’re going downhill”—lands differently after you see how quickly the same opposition flared in 1721. Levenson’s history doesn’t say vaccine opponents have always been the same people or the same situation. It says the cast of arguments has been rehearsing for centuries. Today’s online heat, then, isn’t a new species of denial. It’s an old family tree growing new branches.
vaccine opposition smallpox inoculation Stanley Plotkin Thomas Levenson Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Cotton Mather history of medicine