Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [102]
Events came to a head on November 18, six days after Thomas Hazelton’s death. Camden’s vaccine crisis was no longer just a local or regional story. It was a national event. Reports of isolated postvaccination tetanus deaths—more schoolchildren—surfaced from Atlantic City and Bristol, Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, too, reported “several cases of tetanus following vaccination, but no official action has been taken.” As telegraph wires fed newspapers from Charlotte to San Francisco the latest from Camden, journalists dusted off other stories from the past year. “The tetanus bacillus has admittedly found its way into commercial virus to such an extent as to have given serious trouble in at least five widely separated districts, and probably in isolated cases wherever vaccination is practiced,” said the Times. Cleveland had lost four people to postvaccination tetanus during the past year. Previously, postvaccination tetanus was a rare complication. One investigator would turn up more than sixty U.S. cases from 1901 alone; most had occurred in November. All of those local events and stories seemed connected, like an epidemic, creating a widening sense of collective connectedness and complicity that transcended local political boundaries.30
Also on November 18, the St. Louis coroner announced his verdict regarding the first seven deaths from tetanus that had followed the administration of diphtheria antitoxin to children in that city. Citing bacteriological tests, the coroner said the cause of the deaths was the administration of antitoxin containing tetanus toxin. The city health department, not a private firm, had prepared the antitoxin—an experiment in public production that had won the department no small amount of criticism from private companies and druggists. All of the tainted antitoxin had been produced from the blood of a single animal, a horse named Jim, “stabled at the Poorhouse Farm.” Jim had developed tetanus in October and was put down. But serum had been drawn from Jim before his symptoms became apparent, and the serum had not been destroyed. Compounding the public relations disaster was the revelation that the job of bottling the serum had been entrusted to a janitor. The coroner charged the health department with negligence. American newspapers readily extrapolated from the coroner’s findings to the vaccine cases. “No other suggestion is reasonable,” said the Duluth News-Tribune, “than that the unwelcome bacilli secured a lodging place in the virus and the antitoxin in the laboratory.”31
The tetanus scares triggered opposition to vaccination in many American communities. In Rochester, New York, in the midst of its own small-pox outbreak, parents responded to the news from Camden, 350 miles away, by refusing to allow their children to be vaccinated. Two schools were “practically closed for want of attendance.” In response, the city health officer, according to the New York Tribune, “deprecated the displaying of the Camden news.” His peers in many other American communities shared his frustration.32
From the beginning of the crisis, Camden health officials and doctors had maintained a united front in defense of vaccination. But with six children dead so far, the schools half-empty, and a national scandal brewing, the board of health called a halt. On the night of November 18, the members passed a resolution ordering physicians to cease vaccination until further notice. The board advised the school board to suspend enforcement of the vaccination law, which that body did the following day. The health board launched