The Current Intellectual Politics of Vaccination in Historical Perspective

Over the last decade, the intellectual politics of vaccination have significantly changed.  After a period of relatively respectful openness to the concerns of vaccination skeptics, the main public voices of the public health, medical, and scientific establishment have been articulating an extremely hard-line case for the ethics and legality of compulsory vaccination.  Parents who refuse or even delay vaccination are being accused of being ultra-selfish, if not even murderous; pediatricians are frequently being pushed to refuse services to vaccine-skeptical parents; and long-standing legal exemptions that allow some parents not to vaccinate are being strongly challenged.  This paper will explore the rise of this hard-line thinking from authors such as Arthur Allen, Seth Mnookin, and (especially) Paul Offitt, while comparing that hard line to the previous era of relative openness, the opposing perspectives of vaccine skeptics, and the more pluralist way that recent historians have tended to explore controversies over vaccination.  My hope is that I can help bring some of the insights of the historical method—an openness to the viewpoints of others, a chastened learning from the past, and a skepticism toward totalizing policy ideas—to bear on the way we might formulate policies toward vaccination in the most democratic way possible.