Anti-Vax patients 2016 = Anti-Natural-Penicillin doctors 1940

I believe that Anti-Vax (unwarranted) concerns about heavy metals in vaccines and heavy money controlling vaccine approvals are just an unconscious smoke screen to hide these patients' free-floating fears and phobias.

Just as I believe that (unwarranted) concerns about the 'impurity' of natural penicillin among most of the world's doctors and scientists in early 1940s was equally an unconscious smokescreen to hide their similar free-floating fears and phobias.

We easily grant patients as being irrational --- but doctors and scientists, too ? Yep !
While society is quite comfortable talking about 'invasive' surgery, it hasn't been as open in accepting that receiving needles or drawing blood are also invasive, as are most microbial infections and all knife attacks, etc.

Most people, quite rightly, set initial firm limits on invasions past the boundaries of their body and psyche.

But many--- quite irrationally --- hold onto an initially rational fear about taking in unknowable 'foreign' objects to well past the point of common caution.

There are different concerns for each individual as to what is a potentially 'foreign object' and further, their fear level varies widely over each foreign object, by time and place.

Their free floating fear never really goes away, even if they can be reluctantly convinced to take this or that foreign object, on this or that occasion.

And that irrational fear is listened too and acted upon, whenever an occasion arises that allows people to guise this fear as really a quite rational objection based on hard evidence.

After all one faked medical article fanned by one air-headed TV personality was all that was needed to set off our current anti-vax pandemic of irrationality.

In the case of natural penicillin, doctors who had never previously balked at injecting 'deadly toxic but medically useful' serums and synthetic drugs into patients, suddenly ignored the hard evidence that natural penicillin's impurities seemed almost as harmless as did this extremely non-toxic medicine itself.

But the timeless and general revulsion against the melting and dissolving work of fungus because it so reminded humanity of their certain death and decay, the only species with this foreknowledge of their fate, had only heightened during the Era of Pure Modernity.

For a fungus body on a log dissolved not just the bark and fibre into gooey wetness, it dissolved Pure Modernity's passion for pure divisions, such as between wet and dry, solid and slime.

Such that, in the same decade as penicillin's discovery quintessential Pure Modernists A. Hitler and H.P. Lovecraft both found the gooey slimy fungus to be their extreme example of all encompassing evil.

If the thought of the slimy smelly body of the penicillin-producing penicillium fungus wasn't bad enough, the knowledge that penicillin itself was a secondary metabolite (basically fungus piss and poop) was even worse.

Doctors who had balked at eating mushrooms as kids were not about to welcome the idea of injecting fungus into the temple of the human blood supply, not in an age that still thought the genome resided in the 'blood' rather than in chromosomes inside each cell nucleus, not when 100% pure synthetic Sulfa medicine was working so well.

They felt this, but they weren't about to say it aloud - not publicly or even privately.

So the Big Lie about 'potentially' 'dangerous' 'impurities' in impure natural penicillin were trotted out instead.

Even when, as readers of medical journals, they knew better....