[AL: My friend Gord D. wrote this, a draft essay based on research he has been conducting into smallpox epidemics and anti-vaccination campaigns in early 20th century Kingston, Ontario. This research happens to link up with Ghostbusters in some unusual ways, too. Rest assured, similar struggles over public health, with anti-vaccinationists mobilizing the same arguments, took place across Canada] “When a smallpox epidemic hit Kingston in 1908, the biggest anti-vaxxer in town was Dan Aykroyd's great grandfather, Samuel Aykroyd. He was head of the local Anti-Vaccinationist League which was set up earlier in the century, and did everything in his power to sow distrust of the public health authorities. He claimed compulsory vaccination was a scam and that local doctors were making money off of it. Meanwhile, he was also a dentist who advised that the best way to fend off any disease, including contagious ones like smallpox, was to stay healthy and the best way to do that was to have your teeth looked after. He went so far as to say that dental care was the key to "immunity." Although he once admitted that vaccines worked "empirically", Aykroyd had a "philosophical" objection to curing disease through the administration of disease, however diminished. (He was wrong about the dangers of vaccines and right about the importance of dental health. But Canadians don't get universal dental care. At the time, they didn't have universal healthcare either, and vaccines were not free.) The smallpox epidemic had started in April, 1908, was thought to have been staunched (through contact tracing, spot vaccination, and quarantine) by August, then returned with a vengeance in the fall with the opening of schools. It wasn't until November, however, when the provincial health officer warned city officials that Kingston would be isolated, quarantined as a whole from the rest of Ontario, unless firm public health measures were taken, that the local Board of Trade and the Board of Education took the advice of the Board of Health and okayed compulsory vaccination, and the mayor issued a proclamation to that effect. The anti-vaxxers went on to win the municipal elections in January of 1909. By March, almost a year after the first wave of smallpox, they had reversed the vaccination mandate. Four members of the Kingston Board of Health resigned in protest. But by then the vaccination campaign had taken effect, and smallpox receded. Vaccines worked; and it was known at the time that they worked best after revaccination within 7-10 years of the first "scratch". Ten years later, in the middle of the devastating Spanish flu pandemic in 1918-1919, Kingston suffered another outbreak of smallpox. The city was faced with the same quandary again. (It was a recurring cycle of 7-10 years. Kingston was struck by a smallpox epidemic in 1901 as well.) And Samuel Aykroyd? From 1901 to 1921, he regularly published letters to the local Kingston paper, the Daily British Whig about the loss of personal liberties resulting when public health measures like vaccination were mandated.
“Is this Russia? Is this China?” he asked.
[AL: I’ve attached a copy of one such letter from February 24, 1912, in which he makes Sinophobic comments and defends ‘British liberties.’] By the 1920s, Aykroyd was seriously invested in the occult, and had a live-in medium. His experiments in the field of spiritualism inspired his children and grandchildren, especially Dan Aykroyd, who seriously believed in all of it and took those ideas to help launch the Ghostbusters franchise. Samuel Aykroyd believed in ghosts but he never believed in vaccines. According to the Canadian Museum of Healthcare:
Twentieth century smallpox incidence in Canada reached a peak of 3,300 cases in 1927, but fell sharply to zero by the mid-1940s.
What was the smallpox buster? Aggressive vaccination campaigns and the public funding of institutions like Connaught Laboratories, where the vaccines were made. Now the Canadian government has to buy vaccines from corporations, because Connaught was sold off to private interests. But that's a topic for another time.”
