Vaccine Nation: America's Changing Relationship with Immunization

by Elena Conis

With employers offering free flu shots and pharmacies expanding into one-stop shops to prevent everything from shingles to tetanus, vaccines are ubiquitous in contemporary life. The past fifty years have witnessed an enormous upsurge in vaccines and immunization in the United American children now receive more vaccines than any previous generation, and laws requiring their immunization against a litany of diseases are standard. Yet, while vaccination rates have soared and cases of preventable infections have plummeted, an increasingly vocal cross section of Americans have questioned the safety and necessity of vaccines. In Vaccine Nation , Elena Conis explores this complicated history and its consequences for personal and public health.

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.

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.

Genres: Medicine, Science, Nonfiction, History, American History, Politics, Health

344 pages, Hardcover

First published October 20, 2014

Reviews

[Tim Lacy · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are interested in the history vaccinations and their context over the past 50-60 years, this work is for you. Elena Conis begins this story in the early 1960s, with the Kennedy administration's 1962 Vaccination Assistance Act. From there the book explores cultural, political, medical, and social factors that have both promoted and detracted from vaccination initiatives. There is a particular focus, for good reasons, on the presidential administrations of Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton. My favorite chapters were five ("A Mother's Responsibility"), six ("Tampering with Nature"), nine ("Vaccine Risks and the New Media"), and ten ("Sex, Girls, and HPV"). Both five and six get at big ideas and philosophical issues. Both nine and ten address scientific, journalistic, and culture wars issues that redounded on public reception of vaccines.

My particular interest is vaccination resistance, skepticism, and hesitancy, and how both have created movements. This interest stems from my deeper work on anti-intellectualism and pseudoscience. Conis is more sympathetic to resistance and hesitancy than I am. But I appreciated her book all the more because of that difference. I needed to hear an alternate voice on those fronts, especially in relation to the HepB and HPV vaccines. I will leave her book more willing to listen to resistors and skeptics, even if my ultimate position remains unchanged.

If you care about vaccination and its recent historical development and context, buy and read this book. You won't be disappointed. - TL

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Vaccine Nation" is a fantastic introduction to the politics and cultural dynamics of vaccination in the United States from the 1950s through to today. Conis' book does a fantastic job outlining the ways that the development of a vaccine changes the social perception of the severity and stigma of a particular disease. I found the discussion of mumps especially reveling in that respect. Mumps went from being almost funny and an accepted part of childhood to a feared disease that risked the reproductive capacity of the US-- all in a matter of years surrounding the development of a vaccine! The book also includes a great deal of political history around the Vaccines for Children Program and its funding. Political reality, as much as science and epidemiology, often shape the government's support for a particular vaccine policy.

I also appreciated that Conis frames her book around vaccine acceptance rather than refusal. As she points out, well over 90% of children get at least some vaccines and only a small percentage receive none. Given that, the story isn't really about why people reject vaccines it's about why people are so willing to embrace new vaccines.

This is an academic text and not exactly a "light" read, but if you are interested in the ways that the social and the political shape the scientific, I think you'll really enjoy it.

[Ms211 · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author needed to do her research on the discovery of HPV as the cause of cervical cancer that was occurring in the 1990s before lambasting drug companies for promoting their vaccine. The discovery of a virus causing cancer was a massive breakthrough in gynecology and has changed pap smear guidelines across the world. The vaccine against HPV has truly nothing to do with this awareness on a global level among gynecologists. If she had looked at the gyn-oncology literature or talked to any gyn-oncologist who had to deal with cervical cancer and how horrible the death is to those patients, I wonder if this chapter would have been written a little differently. The rest of the book was very good and helps to understand the rise of anti-vaccine due to environmental chemicals in the 1970s. Unfortunately, this is not the reason why most people are refusing Covid vaccination so this book has become dated and hard to read in light of our current pandemic.

[Desiree · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. I learned quite a bit from this. I never thought much about why we had to get mumps vaccines (or I guess, the MMR vaccine in my case). I also was under the (wrong) impression that many (all?) of the vaccines I had as a child had been around for a really long time - they were not. Interesting to see as more information was widely available, the public "fought" back about mandatory vaccines like HPV. If so many authoritative professionals (read: men) had been more truthful, had shared the inserts, listened to the mothers (because, of course it's mostly mothers) who wanted to know more, we probably wouldn't be so complacent. Although, after the covid vaccine, I doubt we ever will be again.

Do I think vaccines cause autism? No, and this book doesn't land either way. She does a good job of presenting the social and political context of vaccines and why we give them to children, and a number of other important things to consider as new vaccines come out. We should already know to be looking to see who is funding the studies, who contributed to what campaign - question why HPV wasn't an imminent danger until Merck had created a vaccine (or how an opioid wasn't addictive - looking at you, Purdue Pharma).

Ingest anything at your own risk, but especially things that are mandatory for your own good. I'd be interested to see her thoughts on the new mRNA vaccines and the covid rollout.

[Renee Florea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I stumbled upon this book while looking for The Dyslexic Advantage, and based on the title I became curious. I quickly looked at the publishing date (2015) as I wasn’t really interested in reading about current date events.
I began reviewing the chapters to resize the author’s purpose was to focus solely on the history of vaccines in our country and review their effect from both a political and social standpoint.
If you looking for a book to validate a closed bias, then this book probably isn’t for you. Mrs. Coins does a wonderful job of researching and documenting the timeline of vaccination from the Kennedy era up to the early 2000’s and the HPV vaccine.
While we’re all consumed with information surrounding Covid and vaccination, I found this book enlightening in that history repeats itself and much of the same political/social positions have been presented before.
By going into this book with an open mind, I found some of my beliefs to change while others stayed consistent.

[Cheyenne Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author makes a detailed history of the last 100 years of vaccination. Her efforts to keep her writing unbiased are very noticeable and appreciated!

[Isabelle Paulsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for rhetoric. Very interesting but way too dense.

[Mills College Library]

614.47097 C751 2015

[William Phelps · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting discussion