Examining the Ideological Inheritance of Contemporary Vaccine Skepticism

Vaccination resistance in the U.S. has deep roots in American libertarianism, but in the late-twentieth century, resistance was more ideologically complicated than this. This paper examines the influence of two liberal social movements—feminism and environmentalism—on popular vaccine beliefs and acceptance in the late-twentieth century, in order to expand our understanding of the ideological inheritance of modern-day vaccine skepticism. In the 1960s and seventies, the feminist and women’s health movements began to change the way many women related to and perceived doctors, medical advice, and scientific expertise. In turn, these movements influenced some women’s, notably mothers’, acceptance of vaccine risks and recommendations in the 1970s and early 80s, as evidenced by the gendered rhetoric of mothers’ demands for safer vaccines in this period. Roughly concurrently, the environmental movement changed the way many Americans thought about the environment, risk, and disease. Pervasive concerns about the uncertain, long-term effects of pesticides, cigarettes, artificial sweeteners, and other chemicals directly informed popular vaccine worries articulated in the 1970s and eighties. Worries about thimerosal and autism in particular were present in this period, and built on long-simmering, unaddressed fears about the chemical toxicity of modern life and its role in rising rates of chronic disease. Vaccination policies and their acceptance have always been as contingent on political, social, and cultural concerns as on scientific findings. This paper demonstrates that key social and cultural changes of the late-twentieth century had important implications for popular vaccination acceptance, in ways that have yet to be fully explored.