Of the more than 200 Americans infected by the measles outbreak in Texas and beyond, nearly all were unvaccinated — including a 6-year-old child who died — or had an unknown immunization status. While a measles epidemic affecting hundreds of people across state lines is hard to imagine in 2025, the vaccine fears that help fuel these outbreaks are as old as vaccination itself. Even when some of the worst diseases known to humankind threaten lives, there have always been those who fear the vaccine more than the disease.
In the early 1800s, some people rejected the smallpox vaccine because they didn’t trust the doctors and scientists promoting them, or because they saw vaccines as an affront to God’s will, or because they worried about dangers they’d heard or witnessed. That the early version of the vaccine occasionally spread infection only heightened those fears.
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