Last December, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro went on an exaggerated tirade against big pharma, suggesting that if “a woman starts to grow a beard or if a man starts to speak with an effeminate voice”, Pfizer would say, “‘We’re not responsible for any side effects.’” (In China, a kind of reverse-psychology rumour relating to masculinity claimed Sinovac jabs would actually add, ahem, an inch or two.)

These days, many people are wont to blame the internet for the circulation of such risible myths. But long before Covid-19 paranoia, in the decades after the polio vaccine was developed, in 1955 – and despite the disease being mostly contained because of it – rumours swirled that the vaccine was a ploy to make children infertile, especially those belonging to a particular religion or ethnicity.

In Kenya, it was Catholic bishops disseminating the idea, while in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Muslim religious leaders called the vaccine a “Western plot”. Such resistance prevented the eradication of the disease and wild strains of polio continue to cripple and paralyse children in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In his book Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History (1983), Donald Hopkins cites an 1898 article published in India saying some Hindu “priests at Benares told of an old prophecy that India would expel the British through the leadership of a black child with white blood. Vaccination, the priests charged, was how the English intended to find that child to kill him”. India was not declared polio-free until 2014.

In colonial-era Burma (modern-day Myanmar), there was a time when “the queen of England had dreamed that a child existed in Burma who would overthrow her dominion. Since it was impossible to know who that child was, the English were trying to poison the blood of the entire Burmese generation by vaccinating them”.

Today, messages circulating on social media in Sri Lanka claim something all too familiar. “All those who use the Covid-19 vaccine given by the government will die within a year due to their bodies weakening,” one Sinhala message board reads. “This is all part of an attempt to sell Sri Lanka to foreigners.”

Whether vaccines are secret weapons aimed at extermination or the profit-driven machinations of a global elite, all these strains of thought can trace their roots to one disease: smallpox. It also spread globally – though no one knew that until the 18th century, after such notable casualties as Queen Mary II of England, Tsar Peter II of Russia and King Louis XV of France.

Wherever it travelled, the disease would start as a fever and soon develop into blisters across the body, which would fill with pus and eventually fall off, leaving the victim scarred for life. Some would go blind, and about 30 per cent of those infected died.

Hopkins writes, “the practice of inoculation to prevent smallpox appeared in China for the first time during the Northern Sung dynasty [960-1127]”, and notes Chinese paediatrician Chien Yi (1023-1104) had differentiated between smallpox, chickenpox, measles and scarlet fever more than 600 years before such distinctions were made in the West.

Isolated from the rest of the world, Chien and other doctors developed a method of blowing dried and powdered blisters from those infected into the noses of children. But whatever the methods used, breakthroughs in different parts of the world followed the realisation that those who survived the disease never became infected again.

The technique developed in the West was to deliberately infect children through a process called variolation: cutting into the flesh and implanting a thread soaked with pus taken from a smallpox-infected person, then hoping for a mild attack. One in 50 treated this way died, but the premise stuck.

George Washington, himself infected with smallpox as a youth, ordered variolation of his troops ahead of the decisive battle for Boston in 1775, which warded off the scourge. The American rebels took control of the heavily infected city from the British and, in 1776, the country emerged as the independent United States.

Medical practitioners of those times professed various cures, from herbal remedies to special clothes. One British expert swore by “twelve bottles of small beer every twenty-four hours”.

And then, in 1796, Gloucestershire-based physician Edward Jenner decided to test an English folk theory that milkmaids could repel this new disease because most of them had already been afflicted with the relatively mild cowpox, caught from their livestock – a workplace hazard that gave them natural protection against this new pox, the “speckled monster”.

Jenner removed the pus from the blisters of milkmaids affected by cowpox and injected them into eight-year-old James Phipps, his gardener’s son. The boy fell ill with cowpox, recovered after 10 days, and then Jenner exposed the boy to smallpox, which had no effect. The results were the same after several more exposures.

Jenner’s claims for the method were initially rejected by the Royal Society of Medicine, not because of efficacy – or the lack of consent from the study’s “volunteer” – but because he could not explain why his method led to immunity.

Undaunted, Jenner continued to conduct his experiment on other people, including his own son. In 1798, he published his findings in a booklet, creating a sensation. In the years that followed the practice spread to other parts of England before crossing the Channel to Europe and the Atlantic to North America.

Still, many medical practitioners in Britain opposed such “hideous” and “anti-Christian” methods. In his book Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All (2010), Paul Offit writes that “opponents of the vaccine […] included the rich and famous like doctors and aristocrats”, who made use of the growing number of printing presses to circulate claims about the dangers of vaccinations. “Some even claimed smallpox was God’s will and should not be interfered with.”

In 1802, James Gillray, known as the father of political cartooning, depicted Jenner, needle in hand, vaccinating a woman while surrounded by people who had cows sprouting from various parts of their body. Rumours circulated that those vaccinated had reported terrible side effects, such as children who ran about on all fours, bellowing and snorting. As Offit writes, since the first cowpox injections, “People were really scared they would turn into cows if they got vaccinated.”

(A notable supporter, unfazed by the fake news of the time, was Napoleon Bonaparte, who lauded Jenner’s discovery, despite France being at war with England at the time. When the budding celebrity requested Napoleon release some prisoners, the French emperor was quoted as saying, “What that man asks is not to be refused.”)

About a decade after Jenner’s vaccination method was brought to China in 1805, via Macau and Guangzhou, by East India Company surgeon Alexander Pearson, a local practitioner named Qiu Xi published a book addressing the subject. Aimed at easing fears of the foreign virus, the method was described using elements of acupuncture, and prescribed an aftercare regimen using traditional Chinese medicine.

“This helped make vaccination widely accepted in Southern China in the early 19th century as a result of his efforts and those of other early vaccinators,” writes Moira Chan-yeung, a professor at the University of Hong Kong’s medicine faculty, in a 2017 article published by the Hong Kong Medical Journal.

In 1863, after another outbreak of smallpox, England did not go on a charm offensive, as had been done in China, but instead passed a law that made vaccinations mandatory. This led to a large-scale public revolt and gave birth to some of the first organised anti-vaccination groups.

Vaccines against other diseases, such as rabies, cholera and typhoid, would emerge in the late 19th century, and widespread inoculations became accepted by the public with little to no hysteria. By the mid-20th century, the smallpox vaccine was freeze-dried, powdered and could be transported and stored at room temperature. Even so, it took nearly two centuries from Jenner’s discovery for WHO to declare smallpox eradicated, on May 8, 1980.

After World War II, vaccines had brought under control various epidemics, but as memories of such diseases faded, anti-vaxxers gained traction. In the 1970s, a controversy over the DTP vaccine – given to children to protect against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough) – created a sensation in Britain.

Reports emerged based mostly on a study by a prominent doctor, John Wilson, who argued to the Royal Society that many children had died or were left with permanent brain damage from the pertussis vaccine. Six months later, he appeared on a prime-time television programme. “Now,” writes Offit, “instead of influencing a handful of specialists at the Royal Society, or a few thousand readers of a medical journal, he was talking to millions of television viewers.”

A sharp decline in use followed. The government appointed a commission, which confirmed there was no such link, and found Wilson had used dubious data to make his claims. In 1982, an NBC-affiliated television channel aired a programme in the US titled Vaccine Roulette, making similar claims about DTP, and the result was the same: people shunned the vaccine.

A much wider campaign occurred in 1998, when British physician Andrew Wakefield released a study concluding vaccines given to children against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) caused autism. His paper was published by The Lancet, one of the world’s most renowned medical journals. The furore that followed led to a global drop in vaccinations, and measles and mumps began to emerge in parts of Europe and North America where they had not been seen for years.

After experts raised doubts about the study, The Lancet retracted the paper, and independent panels appointed in different countries found no basis for Wakefield’s claims. But the damage was done. It took years before the MMR vaccine regained its previous acceptance.

“Rumours of a link between the vaccine and the onset of autism were already circulating before Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues published their now retracted case study of 12 children in the United Kingdom,” writes Heidi Larson in her 2020 book Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start – and Why They Don’t Go Away. “When the suspicion was in print, and particularly when it was covered in the mainstream media, panic about the perceived risk went viral.”

If the essential elements of vaccine suspicion have not changed much in more than two centuries, a new concern during the Covid-19 vaccine roll-outs is how any perceived correlation between inoculation and instances of deaths is being lapped up as clickbait fodder for social media dissemination.

Reports from South Korea during the last influenza season reported more than 80 deaths of elderly people who had taken the vaccine, though experts who examined the cases found no link between the two things. But it sure did hog the headlines.

Writing in The Diplomat last November, Justin Fendos, a professor at Busan’s Dongseo University, pointed out that the number of deaths was similar to times when there was no vaccination drive.

“Many people, especially seniors, will die within a week after receiving a Covid-19 vaccine, even if there is no causation at play,” he wrote. “The public will again be put at risk of being swamped in an ocean of misinformation, malcontent and political weaponisation of the pandemic, leaving large sections of the population anxious, doubtful, and unwilling to be inoculated even if a perfectly safe and effective vaccine does become available.”