BOSTON, MA—Outrage swept over a group of anti-vaccination activists this week when they learned that the participants in Boston's first public test of the smallpox vaccine all died after being inoculated. The vaccinations in question were successfully administered by Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse to nineteen volunteers in the year 1802.
"Anti-vaxxers," as normal people call them, are people who oppose the prevention of disease through vaccination. They often refuse to have their children inoculated because they believe it does more harm than good. True to their reputation for ignoring any truth they find disagreeable, leaders of the local anti-vaccination movement are taking a historic event out of context to incite fear of the medical process rather than of preventable deadly diseases. In an exclusive interview with The Colon, the foremost anti-vaxxer, Patricia Rydalch, spoke about the 1802 vaccination test: "The government has tried to cover this up, but the fact remains that those nineteen people who were given the smallpox vaccine are now dead."
Rydalch, 38, seemed uninterested in the fact that the cause of death for the volunteers was not smallpox and that the virulent disease was responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths worldwide before vaccination became widespread. She further ignored when The Colon reasoned that since the test was over 200 years ago, everyone who was alive at that time is now deceased.
"And look how they're back-tracking now," the essential oils distributor and mother of three continued. "They don't even use the smallpox vaccine anymore; why? Because they know it's not safe!" Actually, the disease was declared eradicated by the World Health Assembly in 1980 thanks to the vaccine's success, so it is now administered in special cases only.
Rydalch had to cut the interview short to "go protest science" outside Boston University and declined to comment further.