Vicki Gibson

“Debates over vaccination, then as now, are often cast as debates over the integrity of science, though they could just as easily be understood as conversations about power. The working-class people who resisted Britain's 1853 provision for free, mandatory vaccination were concerned, in part, with their own freedom. Faced with fines, imprisonment, and the seizure of their property if they did not vaccinate their infants, they sometimes compared their predicament to slavery. 

Vaccinations, like slavery, raises some pressing questions about one's rights to one's own body. But as the historian Nadja Durbach has noted, antivaccinators were often more interested in abolition as a metaphor for individual liberty than they were in the cause as a shared purpose. It was not in the recklessly selfless spirit of John Brown, who was hanged with his sons for their doomed effort to free slaves, that white workers resisted vaccination. "Anti-vaccinators were quick to draw on the political, emotive, or rhetorical value of the slave, or of the colonized African," Durbach writes of the movement in Britain. "They were quicker still to claim that the suffering of white English citizens took precedence over that of the oppressed elsewhere." Their primary concern, in other words, was with people like them. ”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation