Joe Rogan | The First Anti-Vax Movement w/Lindsey Fitzharris

Just being with patients, if a patient comes in with smallpox, and in smallpox, a lot of people, I don't know if I, did I send you a picture of smallpox, Jamie? A lot of people think, oh, it's like chickenpox, like it's not like chickenpox, it's a really awful disease. And it's the only disease that we have eradicated ever in human history, yeah, which is incredible. So it's one of those ones, yeah, they're... Yeah, it's unbelievably bad. Makes me itch when I look at it as well. Yeah, it's horrific. And you see children with it, it's just, and it was so common. It was very common, it was very feared as well, because it was so disfiguring. And so, if you were, for instance, a wealthy woman, and you got smallpox and you were scarred, your family might worry that they couldn't marry you off. So, you know, it was one of those diseases that left its mark on you, literally. And it also had a high mortality rate as well, but it wasn't like chickenpox. No. There's my PSA. Yeah, there you go. It's not like chickenpox. Well, it's one of those things that we're so thankful that people have figured out how to get rid of something. Yeah, and smallpox vaccine was invented in the 18th century, most people don't know, it's that old. That's incredible. Yeah, Edward Jenner invented it, and actually, the biggest anti-vaxxer movement, or protest, happened in the 19th century. 100,000 people turned out to march in Britain against Jenner. People thought that their children would turn into cows, because he used cowpox, the virus cowpox, to bestow immunity onto people. And so, there was this huge fear that, you know, it was dirty to kind of insert this animal virus into people. And so, there was this big protest, 100,000 people, to protest the fact that six parents had been jailed for not vaccinating their children. And so, the story is much older than we think. And the fears that we have about vaccines are not that dissimilar to what people worried about in the past as well. But Jenner's an incredible figure. That is incredible when you stop and think about the fact that this is still going on today with the internet. Yeah, yeah. With all the, I mean, you can find out. I mean, I had Dr. Peter Hotez on recently to talk about vaccines and the misconceptions that people have. And he explained that they've isolated a bunch of different environmental factors and genes that contribute to autism, but that it all takes place in the womb. Right, right. But people don't want to hear that. No, I mean, and that is the danger of the way information is now spread, of course. Echo chambers. It is, you know. That's confirmation bias is the real danger that people get around. In the past, it wasn't, it was actually harder to get that message out. But a lot of, you know, you get famous sort of cartoons of people sort of turning into cows. So the cartoonists, my new husband is cartoonists. And so it's like this powerful way of kind of conveying images and fears and stuff. And so, yeah, people had that fear of vaccines for a long time. But Edward Jenner coming up with his vaccine undoubtedly saved millions of people's lives. Undoubtedly. Yeah, it's just so amazing that the problem is still around today, even with all the information that we have available. Yeah, I think, you know, there was a Fox News newscaster who recently said that he doesn't wash his hands because he can't see germs. I don't know who it was. I think he was joking. Hopefully he was joking. Because he said the next day he actually washed his hands. I hope so. So people were sending that to me because, again, like, Lister. Yes, right. And I always tell people, you know, it is that idea of what you can't see. It's hard to convince people. And with Lister, you know, if you think about it, here's this young guy and he's coming along and he's saying there's these invisible little creatures and they're killing your patients. And trust me, I have this really weird instrument called a microscope and I can see them. And it was a leap of faith. He was also accusing the older surgeons of inadvertently killing their patients because if they weren't washing their hands, they were leading to higher mortality rates. So they probably fought against it as well. Yeah. So there was huge pushback. So what Lister ultimately does is he turns to the younger generation and he changes their minds. And so it's a slow burn. It's not like, you know, the movie moment, unfortunately, where it just happens all at once and it takes quite a long time. And it's weird that it takes so long because if you think about him coming in 1876 to America, it's after the Civil War, people were dying, soldiers were dying of high infection rates. They were packing wounds with mud. I mean, they couldn't get worse than that, right? And so people were dying of all these kinds of infections. He comes to Philadelphia to convince the medical community and speaker after speaker just denounces him on the first day. And then he gets up and he does his demonstrations and he starts to slowly change people's minds. But it takes a long time. The cover of the American book is, the American version, I should say, is a famous painting by I don't know if people can see that, by Samuel Gross. It's called the Gross Clinic. The guy in the middle, it is gross as well, but the guy in the middle is Samuel Gross. And he so didn't believe in Lister that he would walk into the room and he'd slam the door and he'd say there, Mr. Lister's germs can't get in anymore. And you can see in this that he's wearing his street clothes, he's sticking his dirty fingers into this wound. And there's a woman in the background and she's covering her face and she's the mother of the patient. And she's wearing black because she expects her son to die. So this is the US cover. And for the UK cover, I think I sent that to you, Jamie. I sent you a picture of both covers side by side. It's another painting by Eakins and it was done within 10 years and it's called the Agnew Clinic. And it's totally different because the doctors are wearing white, there's a sense that they understand germs, there's a sense that antisepsis is being used there. So that kind of before and after shot in such a short period that Lister is able to change the world.