Elena Conis, Vaccine Nation

Vaccines are significant medical interventions that naturally induce powerful economic, social, and political reactions. Vaccines have helped shaped narratives about American scientific and technological ingenuity, as well as therapeutic progress, yet they have also been ‘cast in the image of their own time’ (p. 10), The pathway to effective, accepted vaccines has been neither simple nor straightforward. In Elena Conis’s penetrating new book, Vaccine Nation , this fluid negotiation over vaccines for polio, pertussis and Human papillomavirus (HPV), among others, is on full display. We are exposed to a ‘wildly diverse set of influences, including Cold War anxiety, the growing value of children, the emergence of HIV/AIDS, changing fashion trends, and immigration’, that have shaped vaccine acceptance—as well as resistance (pp. 2–3). Conis, a former journalist, offers punchy and accessible prose as she skilfully traces the ebb-and-flow of vaccine history from the 1960s to the present. Vaccine Nation is divided into three parts. Part I contains three chapters and begins with President Kennedy’s Vaccination Assistance Act, which laid the foundation of federal involvement in childhood vaccination throughout the decade. Part II shines a spotlight on the emergence and growth of resistance to vaccination in the 1970s–1980s. Finally, Part III connects President Clinton’s Vaccines for Children Program with even more public scepticism during the 2000s. Conis, an historian at Emory University, closes her narrative with a focus on debate on the linkage between vaccines and autism as well as the disputes over HPV vaccinations. Like the rest of the monograph, it is a model of cool dispassion and Conis does not take aim at anti-science and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, practitioners of pseudoscience and misguided policy makers. Unfortunately, this is a missed opportunity to redress the long-run consequences of ignoring the best scientific evidence on inoculating agents. While the chronicling of vaccine counter-narratives and counter-knowledges is certainly worthy, this reader was hoping for—as in the case of Nicoli Nattrass’ The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back —a more critical reading of scientific authority. 1

Ingenuity · Political science · Politics · Vaccination · Medicine · Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy · Immunology · Law