Vaccine policy made national headlines last week when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine guidance committee met and scaled back recommendations around the COVID-19 booster and the combined MMRV shot. It’s far from the first time government vaccine policies have sparked heated discussion; since at least the turn of the 20th century, the conversation around immunization has been fraught, with each era’s cultural and political issues shaping attitudes about disease, individual rights, community obligations, parenthood and science itself.
Elena Conis, a UC Berkeley professor of journalism and history, chronicled this evolution in her 2014 book, Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship With Immunization. In it, she tells the stories of various vaccines, from that polio in the 1950s to HPV in the 2000s, and how the historical context of each affected its adoption by the public. For instance, President John F. Kennedy authorized landmark federal vaccination funding during a moment when faith in science and technology was high, and the Cold War had made having a healthy nation of potential soldiers a priority. The national guidance to give the hepatitis B vaccine to infants, which the CDC’s advisory committee debated just last week, was established in the 1990s against the backdrop of worries about AIDS and immigration.