The Politics of Vaccination: A Global History

(Hardback)

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Mass vaccination campaigns are political projects that presume to protect individuals, communities, and societies. Like other pervasive expressions of state power - taxing, policing, conscripting - mass vaccination arouses anxiety in some people but sentiments of civic duty and shared solidarity in others. This collection of essays gives a comparative overview of vaccination at different times, in widely different places and under different types of political regime. Core themes in the chapters include immunisation as an element of state formation; citizens' articulation of seeing (or not seeing) their needs incorporated into public health practice; allegations that donors of development aid have too much influence on third-world health policies; and an ideological shift that regards vaccines more as profitable commodities than as essential tools of public health. -- .

Reviews

The reader will be impressed by the high quality of the research and the urgent import of the findings.
Michael Bennett, University of Tasmania, Health and History: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine, Vol. 19, No. 2, 2017

Author Bio

Christine Holmberg is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Public Health at Charit - Universitltsmedizin Berlin

Stuart Blume is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam

Paul Greenough is Professor Emeritus of History and Community and Behavioural Health at the University of Iowa