A history of vaccine skepticism, from 1920s Seattle to RFK Jr.

Current debates over Trump’s controversial DHHS nominee echo the Pacific Northwest’s reputation a century ago as a bastion of “alternative medicine.” 

A queue of men and a doctor at the front of the line in an old room.

A group of Seattle men line up to receive their influenza vaccines, circa November 1918. (The National Archives and Records Administration)

The intense debate over President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., echoes the tumult over vaccines, traditional medicine, and “medical autocracy” heard here in the Pacific Northwest in the wake of the great influenza pandemic of 1918-1920.

The earlier health crisis, not unlike the more recent COVID-19 pandemic, spawned pushback over mask-wearing, vaccines, and closure mandates — sometimes described as “tyranny” by opponents.

Anti-vaccination attitudes flaring in Seattle is just one example that followed the worst of the flu pandemic. During a smallpox outbreak on the West Coast, many parents refused to have their school-age children vaxxed. Smallpox reached Seattle schools in 1920 when 900 children came down with the disease despite vaccine requirements and quarantine for the unvaccinated. The city’s health officer, Dr. Hiram Read, estimated 95% of those kids who caught the disease were unvaccinated. He went on to complain that “the city [is] a hot bed for anti-vaccination, Christian Science, and various anti-medical cults, and it is difficult to enforce vaccination.”

The post-pandemic period also spurred attempts to broaden what was regarded as acceptable health care and increasing individual care options. Washington, Oregon and California were considered enclaves of what we now call alternative medicine, open to new ideas, skeptical of old ways and authority.

In 1919, the Washington legislature outlawed compulsory vaccinations and passed a law allowing the licensing of chiropractors and so-called “drugless healers.” In a 1984 article on the history of the movement, “Drugless Healing in the 1920s: the Therapeutic Cult of Sanipractic,” author James C. Whorton of the University of Washington described the practice as “a nebulous entity at best … so loosely defined … as to admit nearly any curative methods conceivable.” In Washington there were already four schools of thought in the practice of alternative healing: one devoted to secular faith healing, called “suggestive therapeutics,” and others focusing on diet therapy, medical gymnastics, and musculoskeletal manipulations. For doctors, the new legislation amounted to state-sanctioned quackery. For professed healers, the state was opening health care opportunities.

One new healing program that was a direct result of the legislation: “sanipractic” medicine, which was essentially holistic medicine by a different name. A man named John Lydon of Seattle had lobbied for the new law, was appointed to the board of examiners who oversaw it, copyrighted the name “sanipractic,” and opened the American University of Sanipractic in Seattle in the fall of 1919 to get students certified for licensure. He later opened a second school, the Universal Sanipractic College. Sanipractic replaced drugs with “food, water, roots, herbs, light, heat, exercises active and passive, manipulation, adjusting tissue, vital organs or anatomical structure by manual, mechanical or electrical instruments” to restore health.

Lydon was handsome, charismatic and a promoter. Sanipractic was sold to prospective students as modern, sanitary and a sure moneymaker for practitioners. Vaccinations and inoculations were a particular target.

Sanipractic publications produced by Lydon and others railed against vaccinations and the evil monopoly of modern medicine. Vaccines killed and forcibly “pump us full of filthy virus,” they claimed. Their goal according, to one “drugless” magazine, was to end “the despotic tyranny of serum-injecting, vaccine-crazed medics” and “to finally establish medical freedom in this supposedly democratic country.”

Paranoia and skepticism about public health spiked in the postWWI era. Historian Nancy Rockafellar has written that “The devastating epidemic had seriously dimmed postwar optimism and faith in the application of progressive medical science.” Washington state’s health officers, the doctors in charge during the influenza pandemic, were driven from office by resistance to implementing new public health initiatives. Washington also cut its state public health budget in the wake of the pandemic.

And both doctors quoted John Ruskin, the 19th-century author and historian, in their reports, as a kind of warning about what the future might be like: “Any regulations which tend to improve the health of the masses are viewed by them as an unwarranted interference with their vested rights in inevitable disease and death.”

Though he now denies that he is anti-vaccine, Trump’s nominee Kennedy still criticizes and dismisses current science regarding their safety and efficacy. He chaired an anti-vaccination nonprofit called Children's Health Defense. During his confirmation hearings, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, grilled Kennedy over statements on a 2020 podcast that  he would “pay anything” if he could go back in time and not vaccinate his children. Formerly a prominent figure in the environmental movement, Kennedy has made a career out of raising doubts about vaccines and the accuracy of modern medical research, and has made a good living doing so.

Lydon did too for a while, but his school became a kind of diploma mill and became mired in lawsuits and financial difficulties. Lydon was convicted of malpractice and performing surgery without a license, according to Whorton, and by the 1940s many sanipractic followers jumped ship and sought to re-license themselves as naturopaths.

In Washington, people take for granted that they have alternatives when it comes to treatments, but the issues of 1919 regarding public health, science and vaccinations are still raging more than a century later, now at the highest national levels of government. What was a fringe movement at the turn of the century is now being revived and encouraged in a new presidential administration. The outcome of these debates will have an enormous impact on policy and American health.

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About the Authors & Contributors

Knute Berger

Knute Berger

Knute “Mossback” Berger is an editor-at-large at Cascade PBS.