Paying People To Get Vaccines Is An Old Idea Whose Time Has Come Again

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- John Haygarth founded the Smallpox Society of Chester in 1778 in England to promote the then-unpopular practice of inoculation.
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- 'Paying People To Get Vaccines Is An Old Idea Whose Time Has Come Again,' Margaret DeLacy, HNN/History News Network, The George Washington University, June 6, 2021.

Several states now offer incentives for COVID vaccinations, hoping that enough people will sign up to drive the infection rate down and protect the entire community. When this was first tried in the late eighteenth century, it met with mixed success. The originator was John Haygarth of Chester in Northwest England who published his plan for a "general inoculation” of the poor, as "An Inquiry How to Prevent the Small-pox" in March 1778.
Haygarth argued that "social distancing” and other preventive steps could quell urban smallpox epidemics. At that time, smallpox most often attacked poor young children whose families could not afford to shield them from all contact with infectious people. It was by far the most fatal disease in Britain, causing about half of all deaths among children under ten.

Most adult city residents had contracted the disease as children and become immune. Outbreaks struck every few years when enough children had been born to sustain a fresh epidemic although inoculation, a preventive measure, was increasingly accessible.

When it was first introduced into England in 1721, smallpox inoculation, also known as “engrafting,” or “variolation,” was a brutal and dangerous procedure. By inserting matter from a smallpox pustule under the skin of a new patient, a practitioner could usually produce a comparatively mild infection. Although it was less lethal than naturally contracted smallpox, which killed about one patient in five, inoculation initially had a fatality rate of about one in fifty. By mid-century, practitioners had become more adept, making the procedure safer and less complex. Members of the entrepreneurial Sutton family were especially skilled. Daniel Sutton claimed that between 1763 and 1766, he had inoculated 22,000 people with only 3 deaths. However, this created a new problem: because inoculation caused an actual infection with smallpox, recently inoculated patients could infect any susceptible person who came near them before they had fully recovered. Haygarth set out to solve this double problem: save more children without spreading the disease to others.

After studying smallpox outbreaks, Haygarth decided that it spread only by contagion from person to person and was transmitted primarily by an airborne vapor over a very short distance. He drew up “Rules of Prevention” warning those with smallpox to avoid going out in public and those who were susceptible from entering any house that held a smallpox patient. Everyone and everything touched by any discharges from a patient should be washed and exposed to fresh air and all medical attendants must wash their hands. Then he launched a campaign in Chester for mass inoculations. Inoculating groups of people at the same time could also reduce the odds that they would transmit smallpox.

With his ally Thomas Falconer, Haygarth founded a "Society for Promoting Inoculation at Stated Periods and Preventing the Natural Smallpox" in Chester. They raised donations to pay local doctors to perform the procedure and to pay poor families for bringing their children. All the doctors volunteered to participate without charge, increasing the fund for the families...

Read More,
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/180451
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- Also: 'Opinion: Detroit's Low Vaccination Rate Isn't Just About Black 'Hesitancy' https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016295422



- Detroit offers $50 a shot to people who bring residents in for Covid vaccines.

[captain queeg]

1. Wow. Didn't realize that was going in way back then.

Though I had read about George Washington inoculating his troops with a somewhat similar method. Don’t remember which disease they were addressing at that time.

[appalachiablue]

2. Smallpox, at Valley Forge, Pa. winter 1777-1778:

.. So a little history lesson is in order. If I staged a counter-protest, I’d hold up a sign reading “1777.” After the Redcoats had captured the American capital of Philadelphia, George Washington encamped his 12,000-man Continental Army in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. About 1,700 to 2,000 soldiers died from disease during the six months from December 1777 to June 1778. from outbreaks of typhoid, dysentery, influenza and pneumonia.
The death toll might have been even worse — possibly eliminating the Continental Army as an effective fighting force — if Washington had not taken immediate steps to curb an outbreak of smallpox at Valley Forge. Washington ordered an investigation and discovered that several thousand troops had not gotten inoculated against smallpox. Washington instituted “the first large-scale, state -sponsored immunization campaign in history,” historian Elizabeth A. Fenn wrote in her book “Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82.”...

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/4/20/1939042/-Hey-Morans-How-George-Washington-Saved-the-Continental-Army-from-a-Deadly-Disease?utm_campaign=recent

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3. How Crude Smallpox Inoculations Helped George Washington Win the War

I love history. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it

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When George Washington took command of the Continental Army in 1775, America was fighting a war on two fronts: one for independence from the British, and a second for survival against smallpox. Because Washington knew the ravages of the disease firsthand, he understood that the smallpox virus, then an invisible enemy, could cripple his army and end the war before it began.

That’s why Washington eventually made the bold decision to inoculate all American troops who had never been sickened with smallpox at a time when inoculation was a crude and often deadly process. His gamble paid off. The measure staved off smallpox long enough to win a years-long fight with the British. In the process, Washington pulled off the first massive, state-funded immunization campaign in American history......

By the following winter, Washington and his troops were camped in Morristown, New Jersey, where the threat of smallpox was as dire as ever. America’s stoic general waffled back and forth on whether to inoculate or not, even making the mass inoculation order and then rescinding it. Finally, on February 5, 1777, he made the call in a letter to John Hancock, president of the Second Continental Congress.

“The small pox has made such Head in every Quarter that I find it impossible to keep it from spreading thro’ the whole Army in the natural way. I have therefore determined, not only to innoculate all the Troops now here, that have not had it, but shall order Docr. Shippen to innoculate the Recruits as fast as they come in to Philadelphia.”

Fenn says that inoculating all troops without natural smallpox immunity was a daunting task. First, medical personnel had to examine each individual to determine if they had contracted the disease in the past, then they conducted the risky variolation procedure, followed by a month-long recovery process attended by teams of nurses.

Meanwhile, this entire process—the first of its kind and scale—had to be conducted in total secrecy. If the British caught wind that large numbers of American soldiers were laid up in bed with smallpox, it could be the end.