- Location
- Charlotte
At this point, the only people who would entertain it downtime would be the ones who really hate California. Nearly everyone else will jump at the chance to get rid of Smallpox with vaccines.
A Golden Island To The West — California ISOT from 2018 to 1850
- Thread starter Instant Sunrise
- Start date
- Original 19th Century Supernatural
Net? Not that many, if any.
The 'anti-vaxx' school of thought and the bulk of their rhetoric is rather less attractive to those who have seen epidemics or even the nastier endemic diseases up close and personal. I anticipate a 50:50 chance of any public speech to be interrupted with thrown objects at best.
pbluekan
Somethin's Fucky ...
- Location
- Trumpistan
Let's not forget getting on top of the flu. Nobody wants a 1918 flu to sweep through the comparatively ultra dense SoCal greater metro.
Shaithan
Re-class is happiest class
- Location
- The worst part of Germany
Also, this is the 19th century. Depending on where they try to peddle their lies, they may either get thrown into jail to rot or simply get hauled to the next tree. I can also see the downtime nations make vaccination mandatory, especially for things like smallpox, polio, measles and other stuff like that. And 19th century nations may well decide to outlaw anti-vaxx movements and enjoy broad public support for it. Censorship and suppression of speech are still regularly employed and unless the punishments faced are especially brutal, I seriously doubt California will ask for its citizens back.
There is a reason I said 'thrown objects at best'. Even in CA I can see well socialized missionary sorts with bruised hands or bent umbrellas being booked at county lock-ups over "discussions" about the matter.
NuclearBird
More issues than Reader's Digest
- Location
- Here and There
I FUCKING KNEW IT!!!
It was those damned houseflies all along! Those little parasites!
AIUI one of the social factors was the war - all sides covered up the epidemic because they were afraid of looking weak to their enemies.
That's even why it's called the Spanish Flu - Spain was neutral, so relatively honest reporting created an illusion that the epidemic hit them more than anywhere else.
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There is one other thing that is present downtime that causes even more horror, generally, than any of the illnesses listed except during an epidemic: Leprosy. Another disease that can be dealt with quickly, assuming some of the cultural biases that continue to allow it can be overcome.
Also, to play devil's advocate (or, perhaps in this case, Church's advocate), If the Anti-Vaxxers can convince a well positioned Church (pick one, generally of the Christian denominations) official that the vaccinations are the work of the Devil... The position could get quite a bit more "good press" than various are predicting.
Also, to play devil's advocate (or, perhaps in this case, Church's advocate), If the Anti-Vaxxers can convince a well positioned Church (pick one, generally of the Christian denominations) official that the vaccinations are the work of the Devil... The position could get quite a bit more "good press" than various are predicting.
The problem is, vaccination isn't really a brand new idea. We have far superior technology, but the basic idea had existed for a century already. Variolation - Wikipedia Even the word vaccination (referring to cowpox inoculation to more safely prevent smallpox) is from 1798.
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True, but you are still dealing with relatively illiterate/uneducated societies (accommodations were still made for illiterate American military members taking advancement exams up to the '60s) where the man in the street is more likely to listen to a "trusted authority" than research for themselves. The Church being one of the most prominent of those authorities and generally still known for their zealotry, not their rational thought on firmly held positions once made.
I think you underestimate what smallpox was to people before vaccines became a thing.
"Avoid like the plague" wasn't a joke to these people, it was a downright horror that could befall them and END them, their families, and everyone they knew in a gruesome and painful way. And there was no way of preventing it or stopping it once it occurred.
And any christian church would be the very first to welcome vaccines, they after all were the ones who had to most often deal with the dead and sick, dying along with them, being unable due to their status just lock themselves away.
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My point is that if "The Church" were going to be opposed to vaccination, we'd already know it, because vaccination is not an alien idea in 1850.
Compulsory vaccination was introduced in, for example, the UK in 1853. And there were people opposed to it, but there doesn't seem to have been the institutional opposition from religious authorities you're suggesting.
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actually. one of the canons of the church, fourth lateran council I believe, was that before treating you for illness a physician was required to obtain a second opinion from a priest. That said basically no one actually listened to it.
This is a very, very modern understanding of religion as a reactionary force, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't actually hold up given that the rise of the anti-science religious right as a bloc is actually pretty recent.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
In America at least, the "religious right" basically only dates to the seventies with Roe v. Wade and the quest to find a unifying vote-driver after segregation lost.
- Location
- Charlotte
Religion played a major part in the civil rights movement, and it still plays a part in equality for the LGBT community among other things. People, especially bigots, will twist anything to suit their ideas.
I didn't say it was a joke, in any sense. Nor did I say that they weren't horrified about it. Do remember, though, that this is about the same timeframe that smallpox infected blankets were being handed out to Native Americans as a ploy to steal their land.
I think you both missed the point I made about convincing a well positioned church official: Once that authority has a firm opinion, and assuming that they were in a high enough position of influence or authority, the zealous belief would lead to a "I know what I know, don't confuse me with the facts" situation. That is neither an exaggeration nor an idiosyncratic convention, people were still being murdered as heretics for being part of the wrong sect or refusing to convert to the temporal/secular authority's religion of the day (though at a greatly reduced likelihood from a couple centuries earlier).
- Location
- The Old Dominion
There is one recorded incidence where we know a british commander during the siege of fort Pitt in 1763 deliberately tried to spread smallpox among Indians via blankets though how he thought it would work in a time when people thought miasma was responsible for disease I am not sure but pretty horrid regardless.
There isn't really any concrete evidence however that his attempt even worked or that anyone else had tried the same thing that though evidence seems to point that its not exactly the most efficient way to spread smallpox as compared to respiratory transmission because of the nature of smallpox and the attempt historically was pretty much impossible to separate from exisitng epidemics already raging from previous contract with colonists from what I can find on the matter.
There isn't really any concrete evidence however that his attempt even worked or that anyone else had tried the same thing that though evidence seems to point that its not exactly the most efficient way to spread smallpox as compared to respiratory transmission because of the nature of smallpox and the attempt historically was pretty much impossible to separate from exisitng epidemics already raging from previous contract with colonists from what I can find on the matter.
Here is the problem. If someone is 'well positioned' enough to influence more than a single congregation, they are networked with a number of colleagues who can and in the case of attempting anti-vaccination propaganda likely will buttonhole them at the earliest chance to demand in the most polite and church-going terms WTF is his problem.
- Location
- Washington DC
I really hate that I'm going to, even indirectly, defend anti-vaxers here but... I really think people are underestimating what good anti-vaxer propaganda could do. The anti-vaxers are not going to go around saying "being immune to disease is bad, please suffer and die naturally, you pure and noble primitives". Rather, they are going to be pushing the idea that vaccines can cause massive damage to children and their decedents. They are going to be pushing the 'vaccines cause autism' bullshit, which the down timers are going to read as 'vaccines might save your kid from smallpox, but leave him a drooling invalid for life, which is even worse'.
In the modern day people can just google bullshit like that, and every official pushes back against that idiocy anytime it comes up. But in this time? Dealing with new foreign vaccines from a new magically appearing and distant country? anti-vaxers could easily play off paranoia or just plain ignorance about California. All they have to do is instill doubt in some local health officials to get modern vaccines tied up in red tape. Because no government wants to be responsible for giving out medicine (even voluntarily accepted) which they have been told might make a number of their citizens (especially children) mentally ill for life. Mandating it? That makes it even riskier (as they see it). So, no, the anti-vaxers are not going to be run out of town, they are going to sound to the downtimers like well meaning people warning them about the side effects of new, untested, and foreign medicines.
Now, that's not going to stop modern vaccines spreading, especially once they are proven to work (and the anti-vaxers fail to show up with more than a handful of downtime examples they can manufacture to make vaccines look worse). A few examples that the anti-vaxers cherry pick could blow up though, which California will need to be prepared for. The anti-vaxers will certainly slow things down, create suspicion around modern medicines, and generally do as much damage as they can to the medical reputation California is trying to build.
In the modern day people can just google bullshit like that, and every official pushes back against that idiocy anytime it comes up. But in this time? Dealing with new foreign vaccines from a new magically appearing and distant country? anti-vaxers could easily play off paranoia or just plain ignorance about California. All they have to do is instill doubt in some local health officials to get modern vaccines tied up in red tape. Because no government wants to be responsible for giving out medicine (even voluntarily accepted) which they have been told might make a number of their citizens (especially children) mentally ill for life. Mandating it? That makes it even riskier (as they see it). So, no, the anti-vaxers are not going to be run out of town, they are going to sound to the downtimers like well meaning people warning them about the side effects of new, untested, and foreign medicines.
Now, that's not going to stop modern vaccines spreading, especially once they are proven to work (and the anti-vaxers fail to show up with more than a handful of downtime examples they can manufacture to make vaccines look worse). A few examples that the anti-vaxers cherry pick could blow up though, which California will need to be prepared for. The anti-vaxers will certainly slow things down, create suspicion around modern medicines, and generally do as much damage as they can to the medical reputation California is trying to build.
Sure, but... they already did that. Addition of a few uptime people pushing the same thing isn't going to make the difference.
And modern vaccines are in fact safer than the ones they were using at the time (with live cowpox virus - the use of live smallpox virus for inoculation having been banned in the UK for example only a decade earlier). There might even be a split within the uptime antivax movement "given they're gonna use one or the other, do we really want to be responsible for that?"
[Leaning on UK laws for the history because it's easier to find information about, since the US is a patchwork of local and state jurisdictions - the US antivax movement also only got its start OTL in the 1870s, imported from Britain]
CORRECTION: Modern smallpox vaccine still used live cowpox virus - safety innovations were in storage, transport, and administration methods, all reducing the likelihood of contamination with other pathogens.
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- Location
- Charlotte
California is going to have to silence the anti-vaxxers to ensure that no downtimer will follow them and endanger others.
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Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
As the above picture shows, a big thing is that modern anti-vaxxer (autism) nonsense only functions in context of fear of disease having vastly diminished, while anti-vaxxers of the era had to be more about death and other severe things.
"Your child might have more trouble learning and be less sociable" doesn't really work as a threat worse than risk of polio or smallpox to people actually familiar with polio and smallpox; as such, modern anti-vaxxers are unlikely to gain much traction unless they convert to downtimer anti-vaxxer rhetoric. While some might, I find it questionable for the majority, as however ill-informed they are they're well-intentioned and so unlikely to change claimed motive.
"Your child might have more trouble learning and be less sociable" doesn't really work as a threat worse than risk of polio or smallpox to people actually familiar with polio and smallpox; as such, modern anti-vaxxers are unlikely to gain much traction unless they convert to downtimer anti-vaxxer rhetoric. While some might, I find it questionable for the majority, as however ill-informed they are they're well-intentioned and so unlikely to change claimed motive.
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Instant Sunrise
Queen Shit of Liesville
- Location
- Los Angeles
- Pronouns
- her/she
Before anybody gets any misconceptions about the size of the antivaxx movement in California, the state legislature passed a bill in 2015 to ban personal belief exemptions for vaccinations. The result is that over 95% of Californian kids are vaccinated now.
When antivaxxers tried to collect signatures for a ballot measure to repeal it, they couldn't get the signatures required, even in a cycle with one of the lowest signature requirements for a ballot initiative.
When antivaxxers tried to collect signatures for a ballot measure to repeal it, they couldn't get the signatures required, even in a cycle with one of the lowest signature requirements for a ballot initiative.
- Location
- Charlotte
That's a good thing for vaccination