Do we still remember this pandemic which, for the better part of 2020, paralyzed life and the economy worldwide for several months? This is what happens when you don’t have a vaccine for an infectious disease. What COVID-19 is to us modern people was Spanish flu, measles, smallpox, tuberculosis or rubella a hundred years ago. For us, these often fatal and mostly disfiguring diseases have disappeared from direct experience because we were able to develop vaccines, drugs and treatment methods for them. Today, in the developed world, we usually do not know anyone who has been disfigured by such diseases. At the beginning of the 20th century, people who had experienced such diseases could not be ignored.

This leads to an underestimation of the danger posed by these viral diseases – often referred to as ‘teething troubles’. And this leads to an overestimation of the risks posed by vaccinations. You don’t see directly how effective measures can be to prevent a pandemic and serious diseases from breaking out in the first place. They are characterised by their absence. Individual cases, which occur among millions of vaccinated people due to vaccination side effects, then receive special attention from the public, which causes a very special form of people: the vaccination opponents. One does not believe that this is a phenomenon of our time.

On November 4, 1907, the Viennese daily Wiener Montags-Post published a large editorial on the front page, which took sides with the threatening title “A serious word at the right time” for the vaccination opponents. After a leaf epidemic had broken out, the mockery and anger of the members of the Lower Austrian provincial parliament poured out on the vaccination opponents. The (anonymous) editorialist of the Montags-Post was not to be joked with! So he writes there:

For this purpose, [orthodox medicine] used the press, which – in good faith in the alleged blessing of the implant – also did it this service of love. In the “Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung” of September 5th of this year the self-sacrificing cultural work of the opponents of the vaccination, i.e. also that of the numerous doctors and professors opposing the vaccination, is described as a “criminal activity”.

In the name of Germany’s anti-vaccination associations and in the name of millions of anti-vaccination activists, we protest quite vigorously against these gross insults to orthodox medicine and reject all these attacks, which belong to the dark Middle Ages, as unjustified.

The editor sounds almost offended when he mentions the missing interest in an anti-vaxxer-pamphlet with the medical “vaccination friends”, and he sharply criticizes them:

At the natural scientists’ meeting in Frankfurt, the so-called Professor Hermann represented his new-found standpoint as an opponent of vaccination and asked his colleagues to take the doctors, his book, which he was making available to them free of charge. Of the 200 copies that were available for handout, only one had been requested! Doesn’t this prove very drastically that the so-called experts – with one single exception – have no interest at all in clarifying the question of vaccination, but through such ignorance they brutally trample on the sacred duty of a serious researcher.

The culprits were thus not only the researchers, who did not fulfill their “sacred duty”, but also others, to whom even today the big business is attributed, as can be seen in the following line

The vaccination of what is very characteristically called in the other language, the vaccination business, is nothing but a dogma of the medical hierarchy.

In forty years nothing had changed, as it should still be one hundred years after the publication of this article. The pharmaceutical industry wants to make money out of us and is therefore forcing medicines and vaccines on us. Fortunately, there are men of honor:

We recall the words of Dr. med. Hofer, known to us all as a man of honor, with which he averted the doom of the compulsory vaccination of Austria 40 years ago, the words he shouted loudly and courageously into the world in the Viennese parliaments in June 18668: “Without physiological evidence vaccination remains a charlatanism to me, without physiology there is no science, and vaccination is, I would like to say: a scientific crime”.

Especially in Germany, the opponents of vaccination were numerous and apparently well organized. This was reported in the Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift on April 16, 1896:

In the 7th Decennium the agitation of the opponents of the vaccination was particularly lively, but it has increased considerably since then. In 1877 the number of petitions submitted by anti-vaccination activists was only 21, whereas in 1891 it was 2,951 with 90,661 signatures.

The weekly magazine does not forget to point out the following fact:

It is noteworthy that most of the signatures came from the circles of uneducated or semi-educated laymen, while doctors were only very sparsely represented.

To act against vaccinations even offered political advantages, as the Grazer Tagespost reported on May 16, 1876.

“From the Swiss Anti-Impact Association I receive the news that the Glarner Landgemeinde has almost unanimously abolished the compulsory vaccination and that the other cantons should soon follow suit. In England, too, the opponents of the vaccination have brilliantly won the last elections of the Quardians; in Reighley, 13 opponents out of 15, in Dewsberg 21 opponents out of 25 were elected.

For several decades, anti-vaccination congresses were held, probably the last of its kind in Rome in 1914, where a booklet with a list of selected anti-vaccinationists from all over Europe was compiled. No less than 1171 names are listed, with the author’s apologies that he could not give the complete list of more than 20,000 members here.

As you can see, the strive to form clubs by the Swiss, Austrians and Germans was already then in full bloom and is not an invention of our time. And neither is Fake News. None of the three places mentioned in this news from the Swiss Anti-Vaccination Association exist in England.

Only a few weeks after the anti-vaccination congress in Rome, the European armies were facing each other in the trenches and vaccinations certainly reduced the toll that this four-year world war would demand. Millions of soldiers more would have died of disease on the battlefields had it not been for the vaccinations. The Spanish flu that began to spread at the end of the war showed how much devastation a disease can wreak if you do not have vaccines against it.