It is not entirely irrational to fear needles (or to suffer from trypanophobia for those who prefer the Greek term).
Likewise, feeling anxious about injecting a foreign substance into the bloodstream seems quite reasonable. And it is hardly surprising that people might find these things even more anxiety-inducing because of the duty of care we feel toward loved ones, especially children.
The anti-vax movement, thus, has an understandable relationship with fear and anxiety.
In fact, there has been resistance to vaccinations since at least the late 18th century when the British physician Edward Jenner began to promote them as a prophylactic measure against smallpox.
One of Jenner’s contemporaries, the caricaturist James Gillray, famously lampooned people’s fears by imagining how cows grotesquely begin to sprout from the limbs and faces of the newly vaccinated. It was an early 19th-century version of what we today might assign to the sub-genre of body horror.
