By the time of the Great War, the smallpox inoculation was a pretty routine procedure. To administer the vaccine, the skin was cleaned and disinfected with alcohol and gauze, two small incisions were made into the arm, and the physician applied the vaccine directly into the incisions. American soldiers had to be vaccinated before going overseas. The vaccination campaign was largely successful, as the American Expeditionary Forces reported only 853 cases of smallpox and 14 deaths throughout the entire war. But despite such statistics, Americans were highly skeptical at best, overtly hostile at worst, regarding vaccines, and joined broader efforts to challenge, what some viewed, affronts to civil liberties. The National Anti-Vivisection Federation of New York City, for example, published a pamphlet in April 1918 titled, “Why Is My Soldier Sick?” which argued that widespread disease in the war was in fact due to inoculations. Those who are looking for the truth “will find it in the fact that they have been pumped full of disease by compulsory serum inoculations and vaccinations!” The organization protested against “poisoning soldiers’ blood” with smallpox and typhoid before sending them to Europe. Such claims of “poisoning” were far from fact. But these wild claims from 100 years ago don’t sound too different from more modern – but equally false – claims that the Covid vaccine would microchip your children, or other myths.
While authorities tried to counter dangerous misinformation in 1918, anti-inoculation movements proliferated across the country. Even as smallpox spread rapidly through the civilian war production economy of Dayton, Ohio, the local Commissioner of Health wrote, “Dayton is a hot bed of anti-vaccination sentiment.” Officials could not enact public health measures there “without arousing such opposition to all our activities in other lines as to seriously jeopardize our efficiency.” The situation, he feared, would get far worse when the estimated 15,000 workers arrived for war work.[9] While Dayton faced resistance among some business owners – a difficulty experienced even today with COVID-19 – there were some in private industry who actively sought to work with public health measures, reflecting varying public understandings and anxieties of modern science.[10]
West Virginia’s Health Commissioner, too, commented about intense anti-vaccination “propaganda” in that state in February 1918, hoping that the Surgeon General might stop the misinformation.[11] And the Arizona State Board of Health appealed to the Surgeon General about local resistance to public health measures: “Unwarranted and ignorant editorials… have a tendency to inspire courage to resist the law in certain high grade morons.”[12] As is clear through the Board of Health’s rhetoric, vaccination debates were not immune from the broader public health culture of the Progressive Era, in this case, eugenic discourse.