Emily Baumgaertner, Los Angeles Times-

“Seizing our newborn infants,

Blighting their lives with pain;

Filling their veins with poison,

Tainting each tender brain”

So go the lyrics of the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination Hymn, circulated not by the modern-day anti-vaccine band the Refusers but by the Anti-Vaccination Society of America. The group’s members campaigned against the life-saving smallpox vaccine in the late 1800s, a turbulent time when a nation grappling with the aftermath of slavery responded with “black codes” and Jim Crow laws that pushed a divided society even further apart.

Sound familiar?

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