Peanuts by Charles Schulz for May 14, 1956

¡We have babies dying from Whooping Cough because of the stupid antivaccers!

That’s too bad.

Questioning vaccines is a healthy skepticism. Accepting them blindly as dogma is irrational.

When you question vaccines, you question science and you risk the most innocents of lives.

That’s not true! You can contract diseases from vaccines. Sometimes it’s the disease the vaccine was trying to prevent.

Ouch!

Good grief! Only a few years before this cartoon was made, polio was still endemic even in the United States, enough that a sitting president (Franklin D. Roosevelt) and the future Secretary of Defense (Robert McNamara) were stricken by it. The development of the polio vaccine just shortly before this cartoon was made served to eradicate the disease in the US just a few years later. Questioning what has been the single most successful and effective medical advance in all of human history is not healthy scepticism, but absolutely ludicrous.

Look, if they didn’t work, they wouldn’t have them. And there are several year long trials etc to make sure there are no side effects. Now everyone shut up.

That many shots is enough to make anyone fall down stairs; best to live in a home which is all on one floor, that way you can either fall on the couch or on the bed.

There was no measles shot yet in 1956. It won’t be invented until 1963.