Vaccination: a 200-year-old distrust
Protesters against the vaccine policy in France in the face of Covid-19.
Paris, July 24, 2021. REUTERS - BENOIT TESSIER
Text by: Lou Roméo Follow
7 mins
This Saturday, July 24, more than 160,000 people, opposed to vaccines or the health pass, marched across France.
But far from forming a homogeneous movement, those that are often too quickly qualified as “anti-ax” are not a recent phenomenon.
Back to the history of mistrust.
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On the social network Facebook, Internet users surround their profile picture with a banner proclaiming "No" pass ", no vaccine, I remain free". Since the start of the Covid-19 vaccination campaign, calls for mistrust, or even a boycott, have flourished on social networks and in the mouths of certain scientists. But if they are particularly visible at the moment, their existence is far from new.
"
The first resistance to vaccination dates from the invention of vaccination itself
," explains Patrick Zylberman, professor emeritus of health history at EHESP.
The first grounds for opposition are not medical, but theological
.
"The first vaccination was, in fact, nothing very scientific: in May 1796, an English country doctor, Edward Jenner, discovered that one could prevent smallpox by inoculating a related but benign disease, the" vaccine. cows ".
The process is then rudimentary: Jenner takes the pus from the infected animals and spreads it in the incision which he makes on the person to be immunized.
Vaccination, an "artificial" gesture that perverts "the order of nature"
If the method proves effective, it quickly raises an outcry. For some religious, to protect oneself in this way from illness amounts to flouting divine Providence and placing oneself above God. For others, the mixture of fluids between animals and humans contradicts the balance of the body and weakens it. Worse, it is an artificial, immoral gesture which perverts "the order of nature".
"
This typology of arguments can be found up to the present day
," analyzes Françoise Salvadori, professor of immunology at the University of Burgundy and co-author with Paul-Henri Vignaud of the book
Antivax, resistance to the vaccine of the 18th century. to the present day
.
None of the major religions oppose vaccines, but minority currents within them continue to ban them.
"
In the summer of 2019, the
risk of a measles epidemic
in New York was such that the city's mayor, Bill de Blasio, reinstated the vaccination obligation to force Orthodox Jewish communities to vaccinate their children against this extremely contagious disease.
In June 2021,
polio
vaccinators
were murdered in Afghanistan by armed men.
Protestant fundamentalists in the
Netherlands
refuse to inject disease into a healthy body.
An argument also handled by the New Age movement or advocating natural medicine.
Why take care of yourself without being sick?
Indeed, why take care of yourself if you are not sick? "
With vaccination, the apprehension of the risk is often biased,"
says Françoise Salvadori.
It is counterintuitive to treat yourself for a disease that you do not have. But this rejection is based on a poor understanding of prevention
:
we minimize the risk of catching the disease in the distant future, and we exaggerate the risk of having unwanted side effects in the near future. Vaccination is also a collective prevention mechanism, beyond the individual, which further complicates the matter. "
But these currents, if they are constant, remain in the minority.
They become more important when vaccination is made compulsory.
The rejection therefore has a broader, and directly political, meaning.
This is the case in recent weeks in France
, where demonstrators march after the establishment of the health pass by Emmanuel Macron, which conditions access to certain public places to a vaccination or the presentation of a negative test for Covid- 19.
Massive protests in England
In the 19th century, England, one of the first countries to make vaccination against smallpox compulsory, also faced massive protests. One hundred thousand people gathered in Leicester in 1885 to demand the repeal of the law. “
The English were demonstrating in the name of their individual freedoms, in the name of
habeas corpus,” explains Anne-Marie Moulin, philosopher and doctor at the CNRS.
The resistance is such that England finally lifted the obligation in 1904. She has never reinstated it since. This type of opposition, more linked to the obligation than to the vaccine, is in my opinion more a matter of political philosophy than of science
.
But the reasons for refusing vaccination are always complex and multiple
. "
Rejection is thus fueled by a loss of confidence in political and health institutions, but fears fluctuate depending on the country, as real or imagined health crises arise.
In the German city of Lübeck in 1930, 70 children died after being vaccinated against tuberculosis.
The scandal is terrible, the causes confused: we suspect a lack of preservation, because the BCG vaccine is used everywhere else without damage.
False study
But if this event is real, many fears around vaccination have no scientific basis.
In France, aluminum used as an adjuvant in the hepatitis B vaccine has long been suspected of causing multiple sclerosis, although
no study has ever proven its toxicity.
In England, it is a study published in
The Lancet
in 1998 which declares that the MMR vaccine, against measles, mumps and rubella, makes autistic.
After controversy, it emerged that its author, surgeon Andrew Wakefield, had knowingly changed the numbers and medical records of his patients.
False,
the study was withdrawn
, but the rumor persists.
Pasteur, "
financial chemist
"
Discordant voices have always been heard in the very ranks of scientists.
From the time of Louis Pasteur, at the end of the 19th century, some of his colleagues directly opposed the rabies vaccine.
Pasteur is accused of charlatanism and swindling: he is suspected of creating the diseases himself, in order to better sell his vaccines.
Journalist Henri Rochefort thus presents him as a
“
financial chemist
”
.
A suspicion that echoes the mistrust against "Big Pharma", a conspiracy theory according to which pharmaceutical companies organize themselves for financial gain and in spite of the common good.
► Also to listen:
RFI Savoirs, Le petit Joseph ou le patient zero de Pasteur
“
It is clear that vaccination has real financial stakes
, nuance Françoise Salvadori.
But it should be remembered that for the moment, vaccines correspond to 20% on average of the profits made by the pharmaceutical industry.
And if France has experienced several major health scandals, such as the contaminated blood affair or the Mediator, none of them related to a vaccine, which remains the most controlled and monitored drug.
"
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