Lora Little’s son Kenneth died of measles and diphtheria when he was seven-years-old. She didn’t blame those vaccine-preventable diseases though. Instead, she blamed the smallpox vaccine that he had gotten to go to school earlier that year.
She soon became one of the most vocal anti-vaccine spokespeople of her time – the late 19th century. Her son was vaccinated in 1895.
In addition to speaking out against rules requiring vaccination to attend school, Little wrote a pamphlet, Crimes of the Cowpox Ring.
She even got an anti-vaccination law passed in Minnesota in 1903, one that made it so that children could not be made to get vaccinated as a condition to attend school. Not surprisingly, the state saw a smallpox epidemic in 1906.
For More Information on Lora Little:
- Pox: An American History
- Deadly Choices
- Vaccine
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Thank you for exposing the cranks. There is no way that a smallpox vaccine of 1896 could lead to any injury. The methods of making the vaccine were uniform. All conditions were sterile. And just because the electron microscope had not been invented until 1931, I am sure that vaccine manufacturers knew how to isolate viruses that they could not see. As an aside, can you tell why any doctors recommended Lucky Strike cigarettes?