Vaccination Quotes & Sayings

This year, 1996, has been designated the 'Year of the Vaccine,' commemorating the 200th anniversary of Edward Jenner's vaccination of James Phipps with cowpox virus and subsequent challenge with smallpox virus. Insight into the nature of viruses, and how viruses interact with mammalian cells, has evolved since the turn of the century. — Peter C. Doherty

It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over."
"Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination. — Leo Tolstoy

A major cause of the Roman Empire's decline, after six centuries of world dominance was its replacement of stone aqueducts by lead pipes for the transport and supply of drinking water. Roman engineers, the best in the world, turned their fellow citizens into cripples. Today our own "best and brightest," with the best of intentions, achieve the same end through childhood vaccination programmes yielding the modern scourges of hyperactivity, learning disabilities, autism, appetite disorders, and impulsive violence. — Harris L Coulter

Whooping cough is not a mild disease. Whooping cough, before the vaccination, could make you very, very sick. First of all, there was a chance you could die from it - small chance, not a big chance. You would be coughing and coughing. It wouldn't last for a few days, like a cold. — Anthony Fauci

Until we accept that our children have much more of a risk of being sexually abused than drowning in a pool, being struck by a car, stricken with cancer, hurt by a vaccination, or diagnosed with ebola, we contribute to a culture of panic and ignorance. — Ann Brasco

Nothing but the natural ignorance of the public, countenanced by the inoculated erroneousness of the ordinary general medical practitioners, makes such a barbarism as vaccination possible ... Recent developments have shown that an inoculation made in the usual general practitioner's light-hearted way, without previous highly skilled examination of the state of the patient's blood, is just as likely to be a simple manslaughter as a cure or preventive. But vaccination is nothing short of attempted murder. A skilled bacteriologist would just as soon think of cutting his child's arm and rubbing the contents of the dustpan into the wound, as vaccinating it in the same. — George Bernard Shaw

A mark on one arm like the one I bore. Here, in this time, the mark of sorcery, the mark of a magus. The small, homely scar of a smallpox vaccination. — Diana Gabaldon

If vaccination can be conscripted into acts of war, it can still be instrumental in works of love. — Eula Biss

There is no question but that perfect sanitation has almost obliteraed this disease, smallpox, and sooner or later, will dispose of it entirely. Of course when that time comes, in all probability, the credit will be given to vaccination. — John H. Tilden

Since unfortunately we cannot, I believe, spare [our children] the shocking truth about the century of the 'mystery of evil,' knowledge that is even beyond the endurance of adults, let us proceed cautiously so that the knowledge will not damage them but will, like a vaccination, immunize them against evil. Is that possible? I don't know. In Holocaust education the outcomes are unknown, after all; only the aim is clear. We teach so that genocide on a mass scale, the specialty of the past century, can be circumvented in the future. — Bogdan Michalski

On May 14th, 1796, Jenner scratched the arm of a boy named James Phipps, introducing into his skin a droplet of cowpox pus that he had scraped from a blister on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a dairy worker. He called this pus "the Vaccine Virus" - the word vaccine is derived from the Latin word for cow. The boy developed a single pustule on his arm, and it healed rapidly. A few months later, Jenner scratched the boy's arm with lethal infective pus that he had taken from a smallpox patient - today, this is called a challenge trial. The boy did not come down with smallpox. Edward Jenner had discovered and named vaccination - the practice of infecting a person with a mild or harmless virus in order to strengthen his or her immunity to a similar disease-causing virus. "It now becomes too manifest to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice," Jenner wrote in 1801. — Richard Preston

I once believed in Jenner; I once believed in Pasteur. I believed in vaccination. I believed in vivisection. But I changed my views as the result of hard thinking. — Walter Hadwen

In the case of Pakistan, the CIA actually used a fake vaccination campaign to try to locate Osama bin Laden, so now vaccination is associated with espionage. — Eula Biss

I know you're on my side," an immunologist once remarked to me as we discussed the politics of vaccination. I did not agree with him, but only because I was uncomfortable with both sides, as I had seen them delineated. The debate over vaccination tends to be described with what the philosopher of science Donna Haraway would call "troubling dualisms." These dualisms pit science against nature, public against private, truth against imagination, self against other, thought against emotion, and man against woman. — Eula Biss

I am, and have been for years, a confirmed anti-vaccinationist ... I have not the least doubt in my mind that vaccination is a filthy process that is harmful in the end. — Mahatma Gandhi

I know children regress after vaccination because it happened to my own son. Why aren't there any tests out there on the safety of how vaccines are administered in the real world, six at a time? Why have only two of the 36 shots our kids receive been looked at for their relationship to autism? — Jenny McCarthy

Maybe what will really work is we all need to have a fear tree in our backyard or a small fear plant growing on our apartment windowsill. When we are feeling uneasy we pluck a few leaves and find the right place to put them. Champagne would be the number one choice but spaghetti works, too. Have a little fear at least once a week and you will build up your resistance. Like a vaccination. Then, when wars and hatreds come along you'll be able to recognize that's just another expression of Fear. No thanks, I've had my quota. — Nikki Giovanni

Vaccination is a public health issue because influenza is a highly contagious disease. If you don't vaccinate your child, his or her schoolmates are much more likely to become ill. That is why some places (New York, for example) are making the vaccine mandatory for school children. — Michael Specter

The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases. From the love of splendour, from the indulgences of luxury, and from his fondness for amusement he has familiarised himself with a great number of animals, which may not originally have been intended for his associates.
The wolf, disarmed of ferocity, is now pillowed in the lady's lap. The cat, the little tiger of our island, whose natural home is the forest, is equally domesticated and caressed. The cow, the hog, the sheep, and the horse, are all, for a variety of purposes, brought under his care and dominion. — Edward Jenner

As well consult a butcher on the value of vegetarianism as a doctor on the worth of vaccination. — George Bernard Shaw

A free country? they asked. You should live so long. What's free about it, they reasoned, when the law forces you to educate your children and then endangers their lives to get them into school? — Betty Smith

The use of vaccine in the control of yellow fever should occupy more or less the same place that typhoid fever vaccine has in the control of typhoid fever. No sanitary authority would desire to substitute typhoid vaccine for the supply of pure water and food, so we must not accept the yellow fever vaccine as a substitute for the elimination of Aedes aegypti. The vaccine provides individual protection for the person who cannot be protected by more general measures. — Fred Lowe Soper

Her conclusion: "You just have to follow your own heart" when it comes to medical decision-making. — Emily Matchar

A big change is coming, and politicians, self-important scientists, and unctuously blathering religious leaders may want to, but will never be able to, stop it. There is no vaccination against thinking. Ideas know no boundaries and no censorship. And what's more, ideas have a dangerous tendency to spread like wildfire. — Erich Von Daniken

Here in Bosnia I had already seen several cases of rheumatic fever and a case we thought was miliary tuberculosis, diseases now rare in America. It was sobering to think that the mundane process of vaccinating these children might ultimately save more lives than any UN-brokered peace treaty. — Pamela Grim

The rich man's dog gets more in the way of vaccination, medicine and medical care than do the workers upon whom the rich man's wealth is built. — Samora Machel

-Speaking about Vaccinations -
If you accept the truth after the fact, the pain will last a life time. — Richard Diaz

I was less successful in my attempts to effect preventive vaccination against typhus by using the virus and in trying to produce large quantities of serum using large animals. — Charles Jules Henry Nicole

There is no vaccination against creative blocks. And nowhere else are they as devastating as in fashion which, unlike art or literature, dies the moment it is born. — Katarina West

I experienced how foreign aid for large-scale vaccination projects helps to save the life of children and thus give a real input to growth and to escaping poverty. — Jonas Gahr Store

Knowledge is the vaccination that keeps you away from the flu of misery — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

I think that people's resistance to vaccination isn't going to disappear until we address some of the nonmedical reasons for that resistance and people's discomfort and distrust of the government. That's bigger than what most medical professionals can handle. — Eula Biss

the Great Vaccination - the vaccination against the stupidity of the intelligentsia. — Alvaro De Campos

It wasn't the execution per se; except for the warden's bizarre blue shirt, it had seemed as prosaic as getting a tetanus shot or a shingles vaccination. That was actually the horror of it. Something — Stephen King

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Universal vaccination may well be the greatest success story in medical history. — Michael Specter

We are justified in feeling threatened by the unlimited expansion of industry, and we are justified in fearing that our interests are secondary to corporate interests. But refusal of vaccination undermines a system that is not actually typical of capitalism. It is a system in which both the burdens and the benefits are shared across the entire population. Vaccination allows us to use the products of capitalism for purposes that are counter to the pressures of capital. — Eula Biss

Vaccination programs were instituted in the late 1930s, and the first handful of autistic babies were noted in the early 1940s. When vaccination programs were expanded after the war, the number of autistic children increased greatly. — Harris L Coulter

In the USA in 1978, they mandated vaccination and it resulted in a three fold increase in the reported incidence of whooping cough. — Viera Scheibner

Already published reports, as well as our own observations indicate that smallpox vaccination sometimes produces manifestations of leukemia. In children and adults observed in the clinics of Cracow, smallpox vaccination has been followed by violent local and general reactions and by leukemia. — Julian Aleksandrowicz

Iscussing vaccination with a doctor is like discussing vegetarianism with a butcher ... — George Bernard Shaw

You no more have the right to risk others by failing to vaccinate than you do by sending your child to school with a hunting knife. Vaccination isn't a private choice but a civic obligation. — Nicholas Kristof

Among religious writings the Bible is unique in its attitude to its great men. Even many Christian biographies puff up the men they describe. But the Bible exhibits the whole man, so much so that it is almost embarrassing at times. If we would teach our children to read the Bible truly, it would be a good vaccination against cynical realism from the non-Christian side, because the Bible portrays its characters as honestly as any debunker or modern cynic ever could. — Francis A. Schaeffer

In view of the epidemiological situation in Germany, the lack of evidence for the effectiveness of the BCG-vaccine and the not uncommen severe, undesired side-effects of the BCG vaccine, the STIKO can no longer support the recommendation for this vaccination. — Robert Koch

All sorts of risk-benefit analyses and models of herd immunity tend to produce the conclusion that vaccination benefits the individual as well as the public. When Harvard researchers recently used game theory to build a mathematical model of vaccination behavior during an influenza epidemic, they found that even "a population of self-interested people can defeat an epidemic." No altruism is required. — Eula Biss

The "question" is the vaccination against and the cure for ignorance. — Ted Agon

You cannot immunize sick, malnourished children and expect them to get away with it. You'll kill far more children than would have died from natural infection ... It needs to be appreciated that children in developing countries are at a much greater risk of complications from vaccination and from mercury toxicity ... because poor nutrition, parasitic and bacterial infections and low birth weight. — Archie Kalokerinos

On the pro-vaccine side - and not everyone does this, but I saw it enough for it to make me really uncomfortable - is a tendency to accuse people who are wary of vaccination of being stupid and not understanding science. — Eula Biss

Crib death was so infrequent in the pre-vaccination era that it was not even mentioned in the statistics, but it started to climb in the 1950s with the spread of mass vaccination against diseases of childhood. — Harris L Coulter

The smallpox vaccination was developed in the Ottoman Empire. The vaccine subsequently made its way to England through the wife of an English ambassador who observed the practice in Istanbul. — Firas Alkhateeb

During the last considerable epidemic at the turn of the century, I was a member of the Health Committee of London Borough Council, and I learned how the credit of vaccination is kept up statistically by diagnosing all the revaccinated cases (of smallpox) as pustular eczema, varioloid or what not
except smallpox. — George Bernard Shaw

The truth can finally be told: Donald Trump's autism was caused by a vaccination that went terribly wrong; this explains why he can't relate to other people. — Michael R. Burch

The more it (vaccination) is supported by public authorities, the more will its dangers and disadvantages be concealed or denied. — M. Beddow Bayly

Compulsory vaccination is an outrage and a gross interference with the liberty of the people in a land of freedom. — Daniel D. Palmer

Some very poor countries run great vaccination systems, and some richer ones run terrible programs. — Bill Gates

I attained a triumph so complete that it is now rare to meet an American with marks of small pox on his face ... Benefits are valuable according to their duration and extent ... but the benign remedy Vaccination saves millions of lives every century, like the [gift] of the sun, universal and everlasting.
[Remark made near the end of his life] — Benjamin Waterhouse

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint a second time. — Honore De Balzac

I would like to issue a Mt. Carmel-like challenge to any 10 unvaccinated priests of Baal. I will go into the next severe epidemic with 10 selected vaccinated persons and 10 selected unvaccinated persons, I should prefer to choose the later, 3 members of parliament,3 anti-vaccination doctors if they can be found, and 4 anti-vaccination propagandists. And I will make this promise, neither to jeer nor jibe when they catch the disease but to look after them as brothers and for the four or five who are certain to die, I will try to arrange the funerals with all the pomp and ceremony of an anti-vaccination demonstration. — William Osler

Unfortunately there is no vaccination to protect the soul from the menacing disease of social ignorance manifested by character-void homosapiens. — Tracey Bond

At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary, more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox. — George Bernard Shaw

I would not go so far as to say that vaccination has never saved a person from smallpox. It is a matter of record that thousands of the victims of this superstitious rite have been saved from smallpox by the immunizing potency of death. But it is a fact that the official statistics of England and Wales show unmistakably that, while vaccination has killed ten times more people than smallpox, there has been a decrease in smallpox concomitant with the decrease in vaccination ... It might be appropriately asked, in the words of the Vaccination Inquirer — Herbert M. Shelton

Twenty orphans, one of whom was vaccinated, were put on board a ship. On the eighth day, when a pustule had developed, a second orphan was vaccinated, and so on. When the ship reached its destination, the transfer of vaccinia was made to local residents and the vaccination chain continued. — D.A. Henderson

As for mercury, a child will almost certainly get more mercury exposure from her immediate environment than from vaccination. This is true, too, of the aluminum that is often used as an adjuvant in vaccines to intensify the immune response. — Eula Biss

When I was researching the Victorian anti-vaccination movement, those activists often used a vampire as a metaphor for the vaccinator. — Eula Biss

I keep trying to forget, but I must remember. And gather the scattered continents of a self, once whole. Before they plant flags and boundary my destiny. Push down the watered mountains that blemish this soiled soul before the valleys of my conscience get the best of me. I'll need a passport just to simply reach the rest of me. A vaccination for a lesser god's bleak history. — Saul Williams

Publications by the World Health Organization show that diphtheria is steadily declining in most European countries, including those in which there has been no immunization. The decline began long before vaccination was developed. There is certainly no guarantee that vaccination will protect a child against the disease; in fact, over 30,000 cases of diphtheria have been recorded in the United Kingdom in fully immunized children. — Leon Chaitow

What opposite discoveries we have seen!
(Signs of true genius, and of empty pockets.)
One makes new noses, one a guillotine,
One breaks your bones, one sets them in their sockets;
But vaccination certainly has been
A kind antithesis to Congreve's rockets, ... — Lord Byron

In talking about misogyny and gender-based violence, it would be easy to slip into the conceit that men are the villains. But it's not true. Granted, men are often brutal to women. Yet it is women who routinely manage brothels in poor countries, who ensure that their daughter's genitals are cut, who feed sons before daughters, who take their sons but not their daughters to clinics for vaccination. — Nicholas D. Kristof

We've been using vaccination in some form for hundreds of years now. We have almost nothing in our modern medicine that we've been using that long, and it's been consistently productive even though, you know, the older vaccines were much more dangerous than vaccines we're using now. — Eula Biss

Futurism is almost like a vaccination. You inject a little bit of a denatured pathogen to prepare your body in case you encounter it for real. — Jamais Cascio

We believe that modern-day Hitlers have deliberately adulterated the oral polio vaccines with anti-fertility drugs and contaminated it with certain viruses which are known to cause HIV and AIDS, the chairman of the Supreme Council for Sharia in Nigeria maintained, urging parents to refuse vaccination. — Eula Biss

With the absence of a flu vaccination last year, I did not take a flu shot; but there is still some immunity that carries over from year to year; but about every 30 years, there is a major change in the genetics of the flu virus. — Michael Burgess

Vaccination is a barbarous practice and one of the most fatal of all the delusions current in our time.
Conscientious objectors to vaccination should stand alone, if need be, against the whole world, in defense of their conviction. — Mahatma Gandhi

My early years, my weakling, teething, vaccination, memoirs of the various nursery maids, I dismiss unrecorded: if the Faculty desire a narrative of this period, I fear I cannot oblige them; it would interest no one else.
One observation however suggests itself; if I was at that time what I am now, what transports of delight I must have received when gathered to the warm full breasts of the woman who bore me I drew from that holy source the rich and essentially feminine fluid which gushing down my throat animated my little frame. — M. Le Compte Du Bouleau

Vaccination was, and is, thoroughly infused with our politics, our social values, and our cultural norms. By acknowledging and understanding the divergent reasons why we've vaccinated in the past, however, we just may ensure the continued success of vaccination in the future. — Elena Conis

Polio has not been eradicated by vaccination, it is lurking behind a redefinition and new diagnostic names like viral or aseptic meningitis ... According to one of the 1997 issues of the MMWR, there are some 30,000 to 50,000 cases of viral meningitis per year in the United States alone. That's where all those 30,000 - 50,000 cases of polio disappeared after the introduction of mass vaccination — Viera Scheibner

The small, homely scar of a smallpox vaccination. Rain — Diana Gabaldon

Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know. — Samuel Butler

The fact is that many countries that call themselves free succumbed to medical dictatorship ... people are sicker and less healthy ... A country which mandates vaccination is not a free country ... It is a country of zombies who do what they are told by vested interests who intimidate them and use them to make money. — Viera Scheibner

If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity. This is the principle of herd immunity, and it is through herd immunity that mass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination. — Eula Biss

When vaccination programs are successful to the point where the disease is unfamiliar to physicians and public alike, then concerns can arise with real or perceived side effects of a vaccine that affect a very small minority of those vaccinated. Such concerns lead to fewer children being vaccinated and to increasing occurrence of the disease. — Peter Parham

Vaccination is pretty special because you can do a vaccination campaign anywhere in the world. All you are doing is gathering women from the villages, getting them the vaccines and asking them to go around and find the children. — Bill Gates

Vaccination is one of the easiest things on the way to development. It's much easier than roads and a great education system. It's very basic. It's one of the first things you want to get right. — Bill Gates

You know you haven't stopped talking since I came here? You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle. — Groucho Marx

I am & have been for years a confirmed anti-vaccinationist. Anti-vaccination has no backing from the orthodox medical opinion. A medical man who expresses himself against vaccination loses caste. Tremendous pecuniary interests too have grown around vaccination. — Mahatma Gandhi

Vaccines are the most cost-effective health care interventions there are. A dollar spent on a childhood vaccination not only helps save a life, but greatly reduces spending on future healthcare. — Ezekiel Emanuel