#BTColumn – The African origins of vaccination

The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

by Pedro L V Welch

Within recent times, a debate has arisen in Barbados, the wider Caribbean, and in virtually all of the global communities concerning the efficacy of vaccination for COVID-19. Two main sides have emerged. On the one hand, there are those who support the vaccination programme advanced by the state.

On the other hand, there are those who are strong anti-vaxers. Within this group, there are those who might be described as skeptics, who have strong suspicions about the origin of the various vaccines and who might even fear that harm will result if one is vaccinated.

The situation is exacerbated by the wide circulation of anti-vaccination messages on social media. One of the arguments that have swept across the internet is that the COVID-19 vaccine is part of a diabolical plot to depopulate the African world and that the COVID-19 virus has been created for that purpose.

It is not intended, here, to dissect such views. Rather, it is my intention to explore the history of inoculation/vaccination (variolation is one of the older terms used) in the hope that this will assist citizens in making informed choices and logical choices to overcome the pandemic.

The fact is that inoculation/vaccination is not an invention of the white, capitalist world order. Its practice may be traced back to Africa, particularly North Africa. Indeed, there is some evidence that before 1700, Arabs in North Africa knew and practised inoculation. Thus, the ambassador of Tripoli in a late seventeenth century letter written in Arabic to British authorities, wrote that he and seven siblings were taken by their father to a house where a person lay, sick with smallpox, and there they were inoculated.

In 1714, a letter written by one Emanuel Timonius, and circulated in England, stated that inoculation was practised by the Turks to combat the scourge of smallpox. The letter claimed that persons, who had been-thus-treated, never developed a serious case of smallpox.

The 1714 letter was also circulated in colonial North America, where it came to the attention of a priest, The Rev Cotton Mather. Mather responded to the letter, asserting that he had questioned one of his male African slaves as to if he had ever suffered from smallpox.

Mather reported that this enslaved worker, to whom he had given the Biblical name of Onesimus, had responded that he had had a procedure done in Africa that had given him a mild form of smallpox. He credited that procedure with the protection that he now enjoyed.

As he described it, the African practitioner had scratched his arm with a sharp instrument and had rubbed the pus from the pox of a smallpox sufferer into the area. Onesimus even showed Mather the scar that had been left.

Mather was somewhat skeptical, but also questioned a number of other enslaved workers who reported similar experiences to that of Onesimus.

Subsequently, Mather discussed the matter with a Boston doctor, Zabdiel Boylston, who decided to try this method. The result was a vastly reduced death rate among those who were inoculated.

This was in the 1720s and, as news spread, there were two reactions. There were those who accused Mather and Boylston of a species of witchcraft and even threatened them with death.

On the other hand, others were inspired to try the new therapy. This pioneering procedure soon crossed the ocean to Britain. There, a man called Edward Jenner used the pustules obtained from the pox suffered by dairy women to inoculate persons, after he discovered that this action led to some immunity to smallpox.

Some historical sources also identify China and India as other places where inoculation against smallpox had been practised.

In any case, this information only widens the possible sources and does not detract from our understanding that it was enslaved Africans who had introduced knowledge of inoculation to the white world in the Western Hemisphere. We turn now to the emergence of anti-vaxer groups in Britain and elsewhere.

By 1796, groups had been formed in England, opposed to vaccination. (Incidentally the term vaccination is derived from the Latin term for cow – vacca, which relates to Edward Jenner’s use of pus from persons suffering from cowpox to inoculate persons against smallpox). In 1866, the first formal anti-vaccination group, The Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League had been formed.

In 1879, a similar group had been formed in the USA and was known as the Anti-Vaccination Society of America. Their activism led to the abandonment of mandatory vaccination laws in several states. Anti-vaxers are, therefore, not new on the global landscape.

In Barbados around 1905, during a smallpox epidemic, some groups actively opposed vaccination. Some even hid persons with suspected smallpox infection to avoid the intervention of the authorities.

In Massachusetts in 1905 the state required everyone to be vaccinated and in a landmark case a fundamentalist priest objected and took his case to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the public good and the public health over-ruled personal choices, and refusal met with a significant fine.

We jump far forward in time to Jonas Salk’s work on a vaccine against polio in the 1950s. A radio broadcaster, Walter Winchell opposed Salk’s experiments pointing to the death of some monkeys used in the tests.

The result was that over 145,000 parents withdrew permission for their children to be part of the early trials. Thankfully, by 1955, Salk’s vaccine was approved and the rest is history.

In 1972, news of experimentation, using the virus that causes syphilis, on blacks from Tuskegee in the USA broke, and this gave rise to a number of conspiracy theories that created suspicion on any attempts by the state to provide medical therapies to blacks. This still has an impact on the level of vaccine skepticism, even today.

In 1998, a publication by the British medical Journal, the Lancet, authored by an Andrew Wakefield posited a link between measles, mumps and rubella vaccinations and autism. Wakefield also proposed that all such vaccinations should be suspended.

Eventually after vigorous peer-review, the Lancet withdrew the article and Wakefield was later removed from the medical register in Britain. The suspicion still continued, however, because drama gets read and apologies in small print aren’t.

In 2005, Robert Kennedy, descendant of the late President John F. Kennedy, published an article in the Rolling Stone and Salon magazines, in which he alleged that a substance used in some childhood vaccines was the cause of autism.

Later, Salon retracted the article on the grounds that it contained serious errors. Moreover, the substance, thimerosal, was removed from most vaccines, but children continued to be diagnosed with autism, just showing the fallacy of Kennedy’s findings. Kennedy himself, blamed any problems with his article on the editors.

In 2007, the narrative on autism exploded when a TV celebrity, Jenny McCarthy, charged that her son’s autism was caused by the MMR vaccine. The problem for the McCarthys of this world is that study after study by reputable peer-reviewed authorities have shown that there is no provable link between autism and the various childhood vaccines.

Note, that my own view is that there is no medication that is 100 percent foolproof. However, refusal to take a vaccine is not 100 per cent foolproof, either, but very, very high-risk. Those of us who had had vaccinations as children cannot point to any adverse effect and our lives have been saved from a dozen or more viral infections. Why should a COVID-19 vaccine be any different, with more than six billion doses given safely?

Some point to the rapid development of the vaccine as proof that the science is flawed. However, they ought to be aware that COVID-19 is another Corona virus, as was SARS. The experimentation for a vaccine had begun long before COVID-19 emerged (at least five years before).

Thus, it is not true to say that the production of the vaccine was too fast. All that COVID-19 did was to provide the impetus for finalisation of the original experimentation.

At the best, I would urge my fellow citizens to follow the history, even if they don’t follow or appreciate the science. It may be that the science is not fully perfected on the COVID-19 issue, but the history shows that they are the best that we have now. May common sense prevail.

Incidentally, some of my colleagues and friends who see the current vaccines as part of an anti-Africa/anti-black racist agenda will need to explain why Africa has been largely left out of the global COVID-19 vaccine distribution.

Pedro L V Welch (Professor Emeritus, UWI) is a Professor of Social and Medical History.