I think it’s interesting to note that the resistance to immunization campaigns is nothing new….in fact it’s been going on for over a hundred years and birthed the term "conscientious objector." Read more below....

According to Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threaten Us All, by Paul Offit...

"In 1898, the British government finally gave in (ed. to the anti-vaccine crusaders), appeasing angry citizens by passing a conscientious-objection law. People who didn't want to get a vaccine didn't have to. (The term "conscientious objector," born of England's anti-vaccine movement, was later applied to those who refused to fight in WWI and subsequent wars.)”

This provided working and lower-middle-class antivaccinationists a measure of relief from the repeated fines they had suffered for noncompliance with the law, and from the threat of imprisonment.

"Within a year, the government issued more than two hundred thousand certificates of conscientious objection. By the late 1890s, vaccination rates had plummeted. In Leicester 80 percent of babies were unvaccinated; in Bedforshire, 79 percent; in Northamptonshire, 50 percent; and in Derbyshire, 48 percent. Anti-vaccine forces in England had won the day. In Ireland and Scotland, on the other hand, no such movement existed. No anti-vaccine groups were formed, no anti-vaccine pamphlets were produced, and citizens readily accepted vaccination. While vaccination rates in England fell, those in Scotland and Ireland rose. As a result, England became Europe's epicenter of smallpox disease and death.

For anti-vaccine activists in England, the freedom to choose had become the freedom to die from that choice.“

Beyond the historical interest, I wonder what was going on in England that led to resistance to vaccination campaigns but not in Ireland or Scotland? Did it have to do with their citizens being accustomed to more freedoms than elsewhere in the UK?