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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

> just a few years

That looks to me like a monstrous reluctance to comply with an important health and safety rule.

Change always takes time. India is a large, diverse developing country with many different language groups and wide disparities in living standards. Many people still don’t have access to basic sanitation. Controversies like this are a universal experience in human development. The government’s role is to step in here; casting people as monstrous misses the broader context in my opinion.

This article isn’t about India.

Bangladesh is also large.

Look how long it took for people in the Western world to unanimously accept that vaccines do indeed work and to comply with national immunization programs to protect those with compromised immune systems on whom the vaccines won't work.

I don’t think the smallpox vaccine for instance was particularly controversial?

There were already several states in Europe which required compulsory vaccination before 1810 a few decades after it was developed. I think it seemed like a no-brainer to most at least slightly educated people in the 19th century (after all everyone back then had grown up seeing loads of people around them dying from all kinds of nowadays easily preventable diseases).

Smallpox vaccines were quite controversial at the time and opponents went for much the same disinformation tactics as with the covid vaccines. For example, rumors that cow heads would start sprouting from your body were published (https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/01/07/3755986...) in popular media. There were also Church leaders saying that it was immoral to intervene in God's will in this way: if He decided you should get smallpox then that was your fate.

It's not so far from people fearing that COVID vaccines were full of microchips to control your brains, or that it was all a mass sterilization campaign organized by the deep state or whatever.

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