Receiving a vaccine injection is one of the most useful and low-cost ways to prevent diseases and reduce the damages that viruses may cause to the human body. However, in 2021, along with the fast spread of early Covid-19 with severe symptoms in the US, about one hundred million qualified Americans still refused to be vaccinated. These anti-vacciners organized multiple demonstrations to condemn the vaccine policies of the federal government. Meantime, they also publicized the disadvantages of vaccination to make people join them. Given the achievements vaccines made in various global healthcare struggles, injecting vaccines is a normal and necessary approach to prevent diseases for most people in the world. But, the prevailing anti-intellectual and unscientific beliefs in the US do not appear out of vacancy. Its reasons can be traced back to history.
Immoral experiments on human beings
In September 1950, a US Navy battleship with effusers started to cruise along the cost line of Los Angeles. The effusers on the battleship were used to spread two bacteria of Serratia marcescens and Bacillus atrophaeus to the atmosphere. The US navy had carried out the spraying operations six times while they had also set 43 monitoring points in all parts of the city to ensure they could receive exact data. Through the experiment, the 800,000 citizens living in Los Angeles breathed in thousand of units of pathogenicity bacteria every day, which rockets the number of Pneumonia patients. Just a month later, the Stanford hospital discovered 11 patients that had been infected with severe urinary tract infection, which was a particularly rare illness.
Twenty-seven years later, the secret operation was exposed. The US Navy named this operation Operation Sea-Spray and pointed out that the operation aimed to simulate the power of biological weapons. Besides, they also claimed that the bacteria used in the experiment was safe and caused no harm to the human body. However, the US media still criticized this operation as one of the greatest biochemical experiments on human beings in history. In 1977, the US military admitted that they had operated 239 times of experiments in densely populated areas around the state to test the power of biological weapons. Besides, there was no evidence proving that the US military had informed local healthcare organizations and civilians before they started the operations. These acts violated the Nuremberg Laws without any doubts ( All biological and medical tests on human beings could be processed only when the experimental subjects are in the know and consented).
On the other hand, as for all races in the US, African Americans must be the ones who have the greatest trust gap towards vaccines. An operation survey made by COVID Collaborative (NGO) in 2020 showed a wide sense of discredit to the security and effect of the vaccines provided by the government among the black communities. Less than half (48%) of the African interviewees were willing to inject free vaccines. Besides, only 18% of the African interviewees believed the vaccines could be effective; 14% believed the vaccines were safe. This low credibility of vaccines among African Americans makes people can not help but associate it with the flagrant Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.
Since 1932, human experiments have been held by the USPHS and Tuskegee University in Alabama. About 400 African American syphilitics and 201 healthy African Americans participated in and through the experiment. To attract more participants for the experiment, the organizers promised that all participants could get free medical care, food, and insurance. Nonetheless, non of these participants were informed about the purpose of the experiment, which was to observe what effects syphilis can bring to black people in the long term. In the early ages of the experiment, syphilis was still an incurable disease. Later 1947, penicillin had already been widely used to cure syphilis. However, to make sure the experiment went on, the experimenters not only refused to provide penicillin for the participants but also forbade the merchants around to sell these participants related therapeutic drugs. The syphilitic participants suffered great torment from the illness. Even more desperate was that they didn’t receive the treatments they deserved. Rashes started to occur from the lower parts of their body and spread throughout the body, and the skin and muscles started to rot. The horrifying experiment finally ended in 1972 because the relevant experimenter exposed information to the public media. When the project was facing public skepticism and criticisms, the officers of USPHS still said that "The subjects' status is such that their condition does not require moral discussion. They are subjects, not patients; It's treatment data, not sick people.", which to maintain the morality of the experiment. For as long as 50 years of experiment, only 74 participants survived. Forty of the participants’ wives had also been infected with syphilis, and 19 of the participants’ children were born with syphilis.
Twenty-seven years later, the Clinton government finally apologized and compensated the survivors. This event was a disaster to the public trust in public health organizations in the US. Therefore, ethnic minorities, especially African Americans, were afraid of medical services provided by public sectors because history had noticed that they might become the victims of unpresentable experiments.
The crisis brought by premature vaccines.
Generally, the research cycle of a vaccine lasts for about 8-20 years, including multiple experiments made on the living. Even in critical situations, the research cycle must be processed for at least a year. However, in October of 1976, a kind of Swine Flu vaccine that had only been used 6 months for the whole research cycle started to be widely inoculated by the public, which led to a great failure of public trust in the US government in public health care services.
In January of the year, many soldiers trained in a military base in New Jersey claimed that a kind of respiratory disease might have infected them. Weeks later, an 18 year old recruit dead in the base, and CDC discovered the swine influenza virus in his remains. Moreover, as the antigenicity of this kind of swine influenza was very similar to the virus that caused the appalling Spanish Influenza (which caused about 25,000,000 ~ 100,000,000 death around the world in 1918), which suffered by the older generation in the US society, it soon led to a panic in the US. The president at the time was President Ford. Because many experts had suggested that this swine influenza might cause pandemic influenza at the end of the year, he believed that developing and researching a vaccine was extremely urgent. On the other hand, some conspiracy theories claimed that President Ford’s approach was absolutely out of selfishness. As if he introduced vaccines before the presidential election in November, he could become a hero for controlling the epidemic and gain a great advantage in the election. In many cases, half a year is too short for the research and development of a quality vaccine. The injection of the new influenza vaccine started on October 1st, but just a few days later, three elderlies had sudden death after inoculating with the vaccine. Within the 40,000,000 vaccinated people in 2.5 months, over 500 contracted rare diseases, and 25 lost their lives. Although a death rate of one in a hundred thousand seems not very big, it was enough to cause another panic. On the other hand, the new flu that had been warned of did not catch on, which soon made the Ford administration encounter severe and harsh criticism.
Therefore, Ford lost the election in 1976, which seemed to end the crisis. Because of the outbreak of this crisis, the public trust in the US government’s public health policies took a further hit. Conspiracy theories and rumors about vaccines were believed by many US citizens, which made a public health care service that saves lives become demonized into politicians’ political tool.
I know science, but I trust history.
In the early ages, when the European colonists settled down in North America, trade blankets carried with the smallpox virus with Indians became the way for colonists to have mass extinction of Indians. In this case, the European colonists achieved a wide living space at a fairly low cost. Even till the 20th century, secrete biological experiments from official and non-official organizations still existed extensively. Even nowadays, from time to time, people can still hear about the biochemical leakage crisis happening in the 336 US oversea biology laboratories.
When we associate these incidents, facts, crises, and tragedies with the fierce debate about vaccines happening in the US, it becomes evident that the prosperity of related rumors and artworks in the US was a matter of course. Indeed, the US has the highest scientific and technological level in the world with good education for the public, which makes it seems to view the US citizens as people who respect science and will use scientific methods to guard themselves against viruses. But the fact is that they do know science, but a variety of them chose to trust history.