James Gillray’s print The Cow-Pock, or the Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation! is a savage jeer at the superstition and hysteria that greeted Edward Jenner’s pioneering application of small doses of harmless cowpox as a prophylactic against smallpox. If art really had the political power that is sometimes optimistically attributed to it then Gillray, the most vicious of the Regency satirists, would have strangled the anti-vaccination movement in its cradle.

I cannot read about modern antivaxers without recalling Gillray’s picture. The pre-modern, anti-scientific absurdity of their position was apparent in an age of stage coaches and rotten boroughs. And yet in 2025, after more than two centuries of what seemed like progress, Texas is gripped by its worst measles outbreak this century. Inevitably, the state contains some of the least vaccinated areas of America.

Ironically, it is precisely the safety and rationality of modern society that has allowed anti-vaccination beliefs to flourish. Gillray’s contemporaries feared the deaths of their children and were haunted in their drawing rooms and city streets by faces deformed by pockmarks. Modern antivaxers are exposed to no such monitory horrors. They indulge their stupidity in ignorance of real suffering; their good health guaranteed by the “herd immunity” provided by the mass of sensible citizens who do get vaccinated.

Some antivaxers owe their children’s lives to those they loathe as sheeplike conformists. But they and other 21st-century fools may not be able to rely on the protection of a sane society for much longer.

One of the less frequently noticed luxuries of the postwar liberal order was the licence to be a fool. For the better part of a century, prosperous, scientifically minded countries have tolerantly sustained an underbelly of madmen and extremists — medical sceptics, conspiracy types and anti-democratic fantasists who would quickly have come to grief in less congenial surroundings.

Try rejecting modern medicine in the Horn of Africa. Or dabbling with lunatic ideas in the Soviet Union, whose secret police were almost as unforgiving of political cranks as they were of real enemies of the state. The point is almost never appreciated by the fanatics but they owe their health and freedom to the sanity of the society they affect to despise…

Continue reading James Marriott at The Times.

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