Vaccine Nation: America's Changing Relationship with Immunization

Elena Conis

oct 2014 · University of Chicago Press

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“A strikingly honest, fair-minded, and informed chronicle of the vaccine controversy in the United States.”—Age of Autism

By setting the complex story of American vaccination within the country’s broader history, Vaccine Nation goes beyond the simple story of the triumph of science over disease and provides a new and perceptive account of the role of politics and social forces in medicine.

Vaccine Nation opens in the 1960s, when government scientists—triumphant following successes combating polio and smallpox—considered how the country might deploy new vaccines against what they called the “milder” diseases, including measles, mumps, and rubella. In the years that followed, Conis reveals, vaccines fundamentally changed how medical professionals, policy administrators, and ordinary Americans came to perceive the diseases they were designed to prevent. She brings this history up to the present with an insightful look at the past decade’s controversy over the implementation of the Gardasil vaccine for HPV, which sparked extensive debate because of its focus on adolescent girls and young women. Through this and other examples, Conis demonstrates how the acceptance of vaccines and vaccination policies has been as contingent on political and social concerns as on scientific findings.
 
In Vaccine Nation, Conis delivers “a fascinating account of how routine childhood immunization came to be both a public health success story and a source of bitter controversy” (James Colgrove, author of Epidemic City and State of Immunity).
 
“At a moment when, as Conis says, children’s participation in public life depends on their immunization status, she favors a nuanced view of our complicated relationship with ‘the jab.’”—Los Angeles Times

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Elena Conis is assistant professor of history at Emory University.