Speaking of Vaccination

 Vaccination is big news today, and I managed, through sources who have been reliable in the past, to obtain an interview with Edward Jenner, who coined the word “vaccination” in 1798.

Jenner (1749-1823), who is credited with saving more human lives than anyone else in history, became a political scientist after he died. Nothing much else to do in Heaven, he told me, which is a pretty boring place, though it’s got a great library.

Jenner said the United States today is suffering from political cowpox — the Trump Republican party — a milder but still virulent form of political smallpox, known as Fascism.

As seventh-grade science teachers are still allowed to teach us, Jenner developed vaccination after noticing that English milkmaids seemed to be immune to smallpox after they contracted a milder form of it, called cowpox. Cowpox is a member of the Orthopoxvirus family, which includes the variolavirus, which causes smallpox.

Until Jenner coined the word vaccination in a scientific paper, the procedure was called variolation. To variolate someone against smallpox, a medical practitioner would scrape the pus, or a scab, or both, from someone suffering from cowpox — and at times, someone recovering from smallpox — then scratch it into another person’s arm. This person would develop a mild form of the disease, and when he or she recovered, would be immune to smallpox.

It was dangerous, particularly if the source of the variolation had smallpox. But with more than 10% of the British population dying of smallpox (according to Voltaire, in 1798), and despite opposition from the clergy, vaccination caught on.

Looking back from the dismal heights of the 21st century, the parallels to our own times are apparent. The British establishment derided it as dangerous “folk medicine,” which originated in — Gasp! China! — then spread to India and Turkey, and eventually to Europe. 

Because cowpox, smallpox and Covid-19 are zoonotic diseases (capable of jumping from one mammal species to another) some religious spokesmen claim there is something ungodly about transferring elements of an animal disease to humans — even if it saves our lives.

Also interesting, in light of our own pandemic, is that the proposal for worldwide eradication of smallpox came from a Soviet epidemiologist, Viktor Mikhailovich Zhdanov, who proposed a global effort during the 11th World Health Assembly at the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva in 1958. Zhdanov was deputy minister of public health for the Soviet Union. The WHO accepted his proposal in 1959, signed up the world for it by 1967, and the world eradicated smallpox by 1979.

Some scientists (damn liberals) place Zhdanov’s name alongside Jenner’s as one of the greatest scientific beneficiaries of humanity. I disagree. Zhdanov also helped establish the Soviet Union’s biological weapons industry.

We’ve traveled a long way in ten paragraphs. How can I tie up this column in a neat little bow (as columnists must) from smallpox to cowpox to variolation to vaccination to Trump Republicans to Fascism?

Easy. Trump Republicans, so far, are a virulent form of a cowpox virus, but their variolation of our republic — scratching their scabs and pus into the nation — does not protect us from their virus: It accustoms us to it. These scabs and pus consist of incessant lies, derision of science, acceptance of police violence, portrayal of victims as perpetrators, hatred of “foreigners” — even if they are U.S. citizens — even as the virus-infected superspreaders adopt their “enemies’” practices (the Big Lie, a pretended solidarity with “the people”), their appeal to a state-sponsored, quasi-religion (what exactly is their religion anyway, aside to obeisance to a Führer?) and their, to paraphrase Orwell, endless stomping of boots upon human faces.

The Republican Party today — and according to polls, most of its members — are infected with cowpox — an unsightly but not necessarily fatal disease. It only leaves disfiguring marks. But viruses mutate rapidly. And they are infecting the whole country with this, and as I said, we are not developing resistance to it; we are succumbing to it.

Is there, has there ever been, a “herd immunity” against Fascism?