Book Review: Vaccines -- lessons from three centuries of protest
Anti-vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement Jonathan M. Berman MIT Press (2020)
The need to control outbreaks and pandemics has long created tensions between liberty and interdependence, similar to those playing out worldwide today. Anti-vaxxers is a book that reminds us of the historical precedents to the odd alliances — anti-vaccine, anti-mask, anti-5G, for instance — that are getting in the way of public health right now.
Vaccination has always been a lightning rod for storms brewing over other problems, as physiologist and science writer Jonathan Berman shows. The people who protested against mandatory smallpox vaccination in nineteenth-century England had previously led opposition to the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, which proposed that unemployed people must labour in workhouses for food, often under conditions of exploitation, child labour and family separation. The protesters saw mandatory vaccination as a similar assault on poor people’s autonomy. After examining the rise of such opposition in England, Berman turns to the US experience in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02671-0
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