You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. Today I'm talking to

Rivka Galchin, who has a piece in the current issue of the LRB on anti-vaccination movements.

It's a review of two books, Stuck, How Vaccine Rumors Start and Why They Don't Go Away by Heidi Larson,

and Anti-Vaxes How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement by Jonathan Berman.

Rivka Galtzhen qualified as a doctor in 2003.

Her second novel, Everyone Knows

Your Mother is a Witch, was published last year. Hello, Rivka, and thank you very much for

joining me. Hi, Tom. Thanks for having me. So, anti-vaccination movements might seem like a recent

phenomenon with COVID and MMR 15 years ago, But actually, anti-vacc movements, or at least

sentiments, have existed as long as there have been vaccines, haven't there? They go all the way

back to the 18th century. Absolutely. And that was something that was wonderful in these books,

was to get a bit of that history, because of course, it feels like a kind of new kind of madness,

but it's sexually a very old kind of madness. And of course, feels like a kind of new kind of madness but it's it's

sexually a very old kind of madness and and of course when you see it historically it's more

sympathetic so one thing that was very interesting is is smallpox as bad as COVID is smallpox

was so much worse and and really affecting at some point, I think the numbers

were 10% of London's population. And those who weren't dying from it were disfigured for life.

So it was really quite an overwhelming disease. So you would think that when a cure basically,

or a vaccine that would protect you from this would come around that

everyone would sign up for it. And what was really interesting was to see that, of course,

politics always plays into how people feel about the body which is asking people to get

vaccines or which is providing the vaccine. So that really colors everything. And one of the

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