When did the anti-vaxx movement really start to take off?
With the measles outbreak in 2019?
With Wakefield’s discredited paper in 1998?
Nah, it was in 1853, when smallpox vaccinations were made compulsory for the first time in the UK.

People had issues with vaccinations ever since Edward Jenner successfully inoculated a young boy in 1796, Jenner, upon noticing that milkmaids who caught the relatively harmless cowpox did not get the far more dangerous smallpox, deliberately infected people with cowpox.

This is all well and good, but many other scientists, and just ordinary people had been infecting people with cowpox to prevent smallpox before. The thing that made Edward Jenner stand out, and become regarded as the father of modern medicine? He PROVED that it worked.

I join your collective groan, because, yes, Jenner did attempt to infect children (including his own) with a highly dangerous, disfiguring, and deadly disease - and when his attempt failed - he knew his theory was correct. Great for human history - not so great on a moral level.

Despite the fact that in the late 1700’s smallpox was killing around 10% of the British population and spreading rapidly in cities, rumours abounded that the new vaccine was unsafe, fuelled by cartoons like this one, showing... Cows? Erupting from the bodies of vaccinated people?

In 1802 over a hundred of the top scientific minds of the day vouched for the safety and efficacy of Jenners new vaccine, and in 1840 the smallpox vaccine was offered free to infants for the first time. Only a few people took the government up on their offer, however, so…

In 1853 the smallpox vaccination was made compulsory for the first time, with fines levied on those who did not get their child vaccinated within three months of their birth. As a direct result of that legislation, that same year the Anti-Vaccination League was founded in London.

In the 1800’s the Anti-Vaccination League argued that the smallpox vaccination was ineffective and simply a money-making scheme for doctors (how things haven’t changed) - they also argued that they should be allowed to refuse to vaccinate their children.

By 1867 imprisonment joined the fine for refusing to vaccinate your child and objections spread further. In some cities the officials responsible for ensuring vaccinations occurred simply... didn’t. In 1879 a boy was born in Kent, and named “Clifton Antivaccination”, in protest.

By 1885 there were over 3,000 pending prosecutions for refusing to vaccinate in Leicester alone. That year there was a mass rally in the city which varying reports say was attended by between 20,000 and 80,000 people (The 1881 census showed Leicester had a population of 122,351).

After coming under increasing pressure, the British government folded, and in 1898 removed fines and allowed people to refuse to vaccinate their children if they satisfied two magistrates that they had conscientious objections. This proved hard for many parents to do, however.

Finally, in 1907, parents were allowed to refuse to vaccinate their children if they made a statutory declaration. This effectively marked the end of compulsory vaccination in the UK. By now, however, anti-vaccination movements were already well-spread across North America...

By the 1900’s, however, the anti-vaccination movement was being undermined by the fact that… it worked - smallpox was becoming rarer. By giving parents the option to refuse, the government removed one of the main objections people had to vaccinating - that it was compulsory.

Smallpox was, eventually, eradicated in 1980 - the disease which had, at one point, affected over half of the British population, was removed from the world. Fittingly, the final death it caused was in England, the same country which pioneered its downfall.

Unfortunately, unlike Smallpox, Anti-Vaccination campaigns still linger, growing thanks to Wakefield's discredited study and the internet.

Unfortunately, the lack of compulsion to vaccinate, which worked in the Edwardian era, is backfiring now, as vaccination rates drop rapidly.

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