Believe it or not, getting vaccinated on a train used to be a thing…
“A TRAIN! A TRAIN! A TRAIN! A TRAIN!
GREEN EGGS AND HAM (by Doctor Seuss)
COULD YOU, WOULD YOU ON A TRAIN?”
Wait, why?
Getting Vaccinated on a Train
Smallpox!
Health care workers would vaccinate passengers if they found anyone with smallpox on the train.
Vaccinating people on trains helped ensure that travelers didn’t get sick in one city or country and then start an outbreak or epidemic in another.
But it wasn’t just the passengers getting vaccinated on these trains.
There were mandates for railroad workers to get vaccinated too!
With railroad companies sending out vaccination trains to get all of their workers vaccinated and protected.
But of course, more folks were getting vaccinated than just railroad workers and train passengers…
To fight smallpox outbreaks, everyone was vaccinated when a case of smallpox broke out.
AND IN THE DARK. AND ON A TRAIN.
GREEN EGGS AND HAM (by Doctor Seuss)
AND IN A CAR. AND IN A TREE.
THEY ARE SO GOOD, SO GOOD, YOU SEE!
Well, almost everyone…
It shouldn’t surprise you that people did protest getting their smallpox vaccine.
After all, the anti-vaccine movement began even before we had a smallpox vaccine, when we were still using variolation…
“The neglect of vaccination in many districts of certain sections of the United States has led to a recrudescence of smallpox, with the corresponding suffering experienced by its victims and a wholly unnecessary sacrifice of human lives… Furthermore there are a large number of persons who are otherwise good citizens who because of indifference, carelessness, and lack of information, and oftentimes because of having been deceived by false propaganda and deliberate misinformation, either fail or refuse to protect themselves and their trusting but helpless children until it is too late.”
HS CUMMING Surgeon General
And as we see today, misinformation about smallpox caused unnecessary suffering and death.
What’s different?
Instead of vaccination trains getting workers vaccinated and protected we have anti-vaccine trucker blockades…
More on Vaccination Trains
- Decoding Anti-Vaccine Protests
- Statistics on Vaccination and Smallpox
- The Plano Smallpox Outbreak of 1895
- Vaccinated vs Unvaccinated – Smallpox Edition
- The Leicester Method and Smallpox Eradication
- Vaccinating American-bound passengers on a train of the Grand Trunk Railway
- Scene on immigration train, vaccination for smallpox
- The Canadian truckers would have been horrified by the US vaccine trains of yesteryear
- The century-long debate over vaccine passports
- The History Of Vaccine Passports In The U.S. And What’s New
- Why is there now such an affinity between antivaxxers and fascism?
- School mask mandate wars: Politics (Florida) v. Science (North Carolina)
- The Road to Hitler is Paved with… Masks and Vaccines?
- 5G and QAnon: how conspiracy theorists steered Canada’s anti-vaccine trucker protest
- U.S. passenger railroad Amtrak suspends vaccine mandate for employees