Historical Origins of the Personal Belief Exemption to Vaccination Mandates
The View from California
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9089188 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Elena Conis (0000-0002-3189-4591, University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author), Jonathan Kuo (0000-0001-8111-4875, University of California, Berkeley) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 76 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 167-190 |
| Publication date | 2021-04-08 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-5045 • E-ISSN: 1468-4373 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jhmas/jrab003 |
| PMID | 33624793 |
| OpenAlex | W3132058382 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
A number of states, starting with California, have recently removed all non-medical exemptions from their laws requiring vaccinations for schoolchildren. California was also one of the earliest states to include a broad non-medical, or personal, belief exemption in its modern immunization law, which it did with a 1961 law mandating polio vaccination for school enrollment, Assembly Bill 1940 (AB 1940). This paper examines the history of AB 1940’s exemption clause as a case study for shedding light on the little-examined history of the personal belief exemption to vaccination in the United States. This history shows that secular belief exemptions date back further than scholars have allowed. It demonstrates that such exemptions resulted from political negotiation critical to ensuring compulsory vaccination’s political success. It challenges a historiography in which antivaccination groups and their allies led late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century opposition to vaccination mandates while religious groups drove mid-twentieth century opposition. It also complicates the historiographic idea of a return to compulsion in the late 1960s, instead dating this return a decade earlier, to a time when belief exemptions in polio vaccination mandates helped reconcile the goal of a widely vaccinated population with the sacrosanct idea of health as a personal responsibility
Historiography · Immunization · Negotiation · Opposition (politics) · Polio Vaccination · Poliomyelitis · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Vaccination · Demography · Law · Medicine · Race, History, and American Society · Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy · Virology
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2025 (3) |
| Highly cited | No |