Debates about vaccines are a recurring feature of contemporary politics. It turns out they actually date back more than 200 years, since the development of the first smallpox vaccine. MIT Professor Thomas Levenson, one of the country's leading science writers, explores this important history in a new book about the contours of anti-vaccination thought. Levenson identifies different types of arguments vaccination opponents have developed through history, to help shed light on our current debates. He spoke with MIT News about his new book, 'A Pox on Fools: The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines,' published this week by Penguin Random House. A: Hesitation, skepticism, and outright opposition to vaccines is not a new thing. It didn't just happen starting in the late 1990s. Opposition to vaccines dates back to the beginning of the vaccine era, around the early 19th century. The first kind of opposition to vaccines is this sense that it violates the moral or the natural order. If you believed that God has authority over all of us and is mindful of everything, intervening in the disease process could seem blasphemous....
On a July afternoon in 2019, I found myself in a large, sun-dappled room within one of America's great estates. An assemblage of distinguished jurists, Ivy League professors, nonprofit leaders, journalists, and theologians sat around me in a half circle. I was trying to be on my best behavior, but I blurted out a word dirty enough to make them blanch. In my defense, I thought it was what I had been summoned there to do. An independent commission had spent the previous year contemplating the dismal state of American democracy. In dozens of focus groups that it had convened around the country, participants from across the political spectrum had been quick to identify sources of division'but requests to name the things that united them as Americans were generally met with nervous laughter. The commissioners themselves were convinced that the country needed a shared narrative, but were at odds with one another as to what it should be. And so they called in a handful of outsiders, myself among them, to help inject some fresh thinking into how to find one. The topic was so fraught that we all agreed, before attending, not to be quoted by name....
Sometimes when President Trump talks about Cuba, he throws in compliments. 'They have a nice landscape. You know it's a beautiful island,' he said during a signing event at the Oval Office in March. 'I do believe I'll be having the honor of taking Cuba. That'd be good. That's a big honor.' Sometimes he toys with the idea of conquest a little more menacingly, such as when he said at the same event: 'Whether I free it, take it'I think I could do anything I want with it.' Almost as soon as U.S. commandos swiftly extracted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and flew him to the United States, some administration officials set their sights on the next target: Cuba. Trump, per usual, is focused on business. His administration seems to have turned its attention to Cuba's nickel and cobalt deposits, in an effort to get ahead in the race with China for critical mineral deposits. In the case of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the motivation for the U.S. to focus on Cuba seems more personal. Rubio's parents left Cuba shortly before Fidel Castro took power, and he has long harbored the dream shared by many Cuban exiles of regime change on the island. In a recent address from the State Department delivered in Spanish and intended for Cubans, Rubio promised them a 'neuva via''a new path....
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