Thesis ID: CBB001562821

Calling the Shots: A Social History of Vaccination in the U.S., 1962--2008 (2011)

unapi

Conis, Elena (Author)


Watkins, Elizabeth Siegel
University of California, San Francisco
Porter, Dorothy


Publication Date: 2011
Edition Details: Advisor: Watkins, Elizabeth; Porter, Dorothy
Physical Details: 379 pp.
Language: English

In two centuries of vaccination in the U.S., the last five decades constituted a unique era. American children received more vaccines than any previous generation, and laws requiring their immunization against a litany of diseases became common. Vaccination rates soared, preventable infections plummeted, and popular acceptance of vaccines remained strong--even as an increasingly vocal cross-section of Americans questioned the safety and necessity of vaccines and the wisdom of related policies. This dissertation examines how and why, between the 1960s and 2000s, Americans came to accept the state-mandated vaccination of all children against a growing number of infections despite the growing prominence of vaccine doubts. I argue that vaccines and vaccine policies fundamentally changed the ways health experts and lay Americans perceived the diseases they were designed to prevent. Second, I demonstrate that vaccination policies and their acceptance throughout this period were as contingent on political, social, and cultural concerns as they were on scientific findings. Thirdly, I show how, as new vaccine policies took shape, feminism, environmentalism, and other social movements laid challenge to scientific and governmental authority, with profound--but previously overlooked--implications for how Americans perceived vaccination. Finally, I argue that the relationship between vaccination beliefs and political ideology is more complex than historians have heretofore asserted, for selective and blanket vaccination doubts at the end of the twentieth century were as informed by leftist critiques of capitalism and social hegemonies as by traditional American libertarian ethics. This work draws on a diverse set of sources, including presidential archives; government agency records and publications; popular and scientific print media; television broadcasts; newsletters; internet archives; documents and publications at chiropractic libraries; and the personal files of vaccine scientists and critics. It contributes to the histories of disease, women, the environment, and health politics, as well as the sociology of social movements. By placing public health knowledge in historical context, this dissertation illuminates the many meanings of vaccination that lay between that of gold-standard disease preventive and hotly contested enterprise at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.

...More

Description Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. . ProQuest Doc. ID 879549366.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001562821/

Similar Citations

Book Hoyt, Kendall; (2012)
Long Shot: Vaccines for National Defense (/isis/citation/CBB001210034/)

Article Nabel, Gary J.; Wolinsky, Steven M.; Haynes, Barton F.; (2012)
Norman L. Letvin (1949--2012) (/isis/citation/CBB001320471/)

Book Anne-Emanuelle Birn; Raúl Necochea López; (2020)
Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America (/isis/citation/CBB246542052/)

Chapter Silvia Garofalo; (2018)
Dal caso Tremante alla nascita dei movimenti no-vax in Italia (/isis/citation/CBB648845123/)

Article Baptiste Baylac-Paouly; (2019)
Vaccine development as a ‘doable problem’: The case of the meningococcal A vaccines 1962–1969 (/isis/citation/CBB049448868/)

Book Jonathan M. Berman; (2020)
Anti-vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement (/isis/citation/CBB269088658/)

Article Alessandro Demichelis; (2018)
Understanding vaccine hesitancy: Cognitive biases and the role of trust (/isis/citation/CBB568141355/)

Article Bernardino Fantini; (2022)
Continuità e discontinuità nelle posizioni intorno alla vaccinazione (/isis/citation/CBB600266039/)

Book Cristina Munno; Elena Iorio; (2018)
Vaccini e paure. Salute pubblica, resistenze popolari (/isis/citation/CBB068311554/)

Article Anne Hagen Berg; Stuart S. Blume; (2020)
Reasonable Grounds? The Delayed Introduction of MMR Vaccine in Denmark and the Netherlands, 1977–87 (/isis/citation/CBB482754558/)

Thesis Colgrove, James Keith; (2004)
Vaccination Policy, Politics and Law in the Twentieth Century (/isis/citation/CBB001562080/)

Book Brian Deer; (2020)
The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield’s War on Vaccines (/isis/citation/CBB311227433/)

Book Kitta, Andrea; (2011)
Vaccinations and Public Concern in History: Legend, Rumor, and Risk Perception (/isis/citation/CBB001033385/)

Book Stephen E. Mawdsley; (2016)
Selling Science: Polio and the Promise of Gamma Globulin (/isis/citation/CBB694454743/)

Book Anna Kirkland; (2016)
Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury (/isis/citation/CBB053136475/)

Authors & Contributors
Iorio, Elena
Garofalo, Silvia
Baylac-Paouly, Baptiste
Berg, Anne Hagen
Tomasi, Marta
Demichelis, Alessandro
Concepts
Vaccines; vaccination
Medicine and society
Public health
Medicine
Science and society
Medicine and politics
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
19th century
18th century
Places
United States
Italy
Burkina Faso
Netherlands
Latin America
Denmark
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment