Synopses & Reviews
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 States: 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 scientiststriumphant following successes combating polio and smallpoxconsidered 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 decades 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 countrys 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.
Review
“This is a fascinating account of how routine childhood immunization came to be both a public health success story and a source of bitter controversy. Conis untangles these seemingly contradictory trends and provides a probing analysis of the ways that American culture and politics have influenced how we think about vaccines. Engagingly written and filled with surprising insights, this book is an invaluable guide to one of the most critically important areas of modern medicine. Everyone with a stake in our immunization system—which is to say, all of us—should care about the story Conis has to tell.”
Review
“An original and illuminating analysis of the relationship of vaccination, public health, and American society since 1960. Vaccine Nation is especially strong on the vaccine policies of presidential administrations and on the relationship between vaccine politics and social movements such as environmentalism and feminism. Conis's clear and lively writing style makes the book a pleasure to read.”
Review
“This comprehensive social history of childhood vaccination in the United States since the 1960s is written in clear, engaging, and always intelligent prose. As Conis wends her way through a field notorious for partisan pleading and other intellectual landmines, she convinces us of both the power of vaccination to save us from disease and the sincerity of the often well-intentioned people who question its adherents tendency to oversell their product.”
Review
“In the 1960s afterglow of broad success in defeating polio and smallpox, the US public embraced vaccination. Yet by 2009, debate was raging over its risks, even as some 90% of toddlers were being vaccinated against a raft of diseases. Historian Elena Conis analyses the shifts in official and public thinking on immunization as initiatives by presidents from John F. Kennedy onwards drove waves of mass vaccination. As she reveals, each new vaccine has prompted a radical reevaluation of the disease it targeted.”
Review
“No book on vaccination can ignore the rise of vaccine-safety and anti-vaccination movements. Conis brings out their complexities in the United States with great skill. . . . This is a fine social history of an ongoing story.”
Review
“Conis has produced a strikingly honest, fair-minded, and informed chronicle of the vaccine controversy in the United States. She illuminates issues that others have obfuscated, and she opens up discussions that some have tried to shut down. She understands that vaccine policy is determined not solely by objective science, but also by politics, profits, prejudices, and bureaucratic imperatives. . . . Conis provides that historical context in rich and illuminating detail, and in crystal clear prose that any lay reader can follow.”
Review
“How do some people in a country that rejoiced in vaccines for killers like polio wind up wary of them? Emory University historian Elena Conis goes sleuthing in her book, Vaccine Nation: America's Changing Relationship with Immunization, finding answers in science, politics, and shifting cultural standards about how we vaccinate and what our doubts are. 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.’”
Review
“With Vaccine Nation, Conis explores the history of vaccines in our country, exploring the many reasons (medical, societal, political, financial) why their use has become so widespread. Conis also spends a fair amount of time discussing the many legitimate reasons why people from all walks of life are sometimes skeptical of vaccines, covering heavy metals in the ingredient lists, safety concerns over testing, and vaccine injuries. With its extensive list of sources, Vaccine Nation is a surprisingly balanced history of this controversial topic.”
Review
“Conis presents a detailed, step-by-step historical account, beginning in the 1960s, based on an extensive literature review of all the events. This includes social, economic, political, and commercial aspects as well as issues such as poverty, sex, government, drug companies, the women’s movement, society’s perception of disease, and more. These all contributed to the still-current controversy over the safety and medical value of vaccination, which started with the introduction of the polio vaccine. . . . Highly recommended.”
Synopsis
A fascinating account of vaccination's miraculous, inflammatory past and its uncertain future.
In 1796, as smallpox ravaged Europe, Edward Jenner injected a child with a benign version of the disease, then exposed the child to the deadly virus itself. The boy proved resistant to smallpox, and Jenner's risky experiment produced the earliest vaccination. In this deftly written account, journalist Arthur Allen reveals a history of vaccination that is both illuminated with hope and shrouded by controversy--from Jenner's discovery to Pasteur's vaccines for rabies and cholera, to those that safeguarded the children of the twentieth century, and finally to the tumult currently surrounding vaccination.
Faced with threats from anthrax to AIDS, we are a vulnerable population and can no longer depend on vaccines; numerous studies have linked childhood vaccination with various neurological disorders, and our pharmaceutical companies are more attracted to the profits of treatment than to the prevention of disease. With narrative grace and investigative journalism, Allen explores our shifting understanding of vaccination since its creation. 16 pages of illustrations.
Synopsis
juxtaposes the stories of brilliant scientists with the industry's struggle to produce safe, effective, and profitable vaccines. It focuses on the role of military and medical authority in the introduction of vaccines and looks at why some parents have resisted this authority. Political and social intrigue have often accompanied vaccination--from the divisive introduction of smallpox inoculation in colonial Boston to the 9,000 lawsuits recently filed by parents convinced that vaccines caused their children's autism. With narrative grace and investigative journalism, Arthur Allen reveals a history illuminated by hope and shrouded by controversy, and he sheds new light on changing notions of health, risk, and the common good.
Synopsis
"A timely, fair-minded and crisply written account."--
Synopsis
Vaccine Nation tells the recent history of how and why vaccines became such a prized but polemical part of American health care, politics, and culture. In the sixties, American children began to receive more vaccines than any previous generation, and laws requiring their immunization against a litany of diseases became common. In the decades that followed, vaccination rates soared, preventable infections plummeted, and popular acceptance of vaccines remained strongeven as an increasingly vocal cross-section of Americans questioned the safety and necessity of vaccines and the wisdom of related policies.
Vaccine Nation examines the origins of some of todays most salient sources of vaccine skepticism. It describes how and why presidents from JFK to Clinton championed childhood vaccination from the White House. And it reveals that new vaccines fundamentally changed the ways health experts and lay Americans perceived the diseases they were designed to prevent. Chapters in the book examine how and why we vaccinate against specific infectionsincluding measles, mumps, hepatitis B, and HPVand how social movements of the late twentieth century posed profound, but previously overlooked, implications for how Americans today have come to think about vaccination and vaccines.
About the Author
Arthur Allen has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, the Associated Press, Science, and Slate. His books include Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver. He lives in Washington, where he writes about health for Politico.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I
1. Kennedys Vaccination Assistance Act
2. Polio, Measles, and the Dirty Disease Gang”
3. How Serious Is Mumps?
Part II
4. Carters Childhood Immunization Initiative
5. A Mothers Responsibility
6. Tampering with Nature
Part III
7. Clintons Vaccines for Children Program
8. Sex, Drugs, and Hepatitis B
9. Vaccine Risks and the New Media
10. Sex, Girls, and HPV
Conclusion
Appendix: The Science and Regulation of Vaccines
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index