Anti-Vaccination Activism in the Age of Dr. Strangelove: Tales from the Secret American Medical Association Archives

Concerns about vaccination have in recent years erupted on to the public scene with increasing frequency, and even fury.  Parents express concerns about the connection between vaccination and autism, religious conservatives resist mandates for teenage girls to receive the HPV vaccine for cervical cancer, soldiers in Iraq protest anthrax vaccines, and thousands of healthcare workers refuse the immunization for the H1N1 influenza.  Such anti-vaccination activism has a long and strong history dating back to the 18^th century.  Its weakest period, however, was in the so-called golden age of American medicine in the mid-twentieth century.  This paper will focus on both right-wing and left-wing opponents of vaccination from the 1920s through the 1960s, revising the standard perspective of these rebels against organized and expert medicine as being only dangerous and deluded cranks and instead revealing the complexities of their frequently democratic thinking.  An important part of the story of this activism is its primary archive.  The American Medical Association’s remarkable Historical Health Fraud Collection was the result of the decades-long activities of the AMA’s Department of Investigation, which for many years was headed by Morris Fishbein.  Fishbein and his colleagues spied on anti-vaccine organizations and activists, collected their newspapers and correspondence, and engaged in an active propaganda battle against their enemies.  The story of this particular moment in anti-vaccination activism thus tells much about the quasi-state actions of non-governmental organizations, the construction of expertise, and debates about democracy during the twentieth century.