"This book provides the first comprehensive history of opposition to school vaccination in the United States from 1800 to the present. As vaccine-preventable diseases have increased in the 21st century, Americans have expressed a growing concern over opposition to school vaccination requirements. This book examines what triggered anti-vaccination activism in the past, and why it continues to this day"--
Enter the trenches of the bloodiest battles you've never heard of: the Vaccine Wars. Professor Christopher A Shaw discovered, after a deep-dive literature search on aluminum impacts on humans and animals, that aluminum hydroxide, an adjuvant in the anthrax vaccine, had a significantly negative impact on motor functions and reflexes of patients in the literature. After that finding, he did what scientists are supposed to do and kept following the leads. However, organizations like WHO dismissed him immediately. Those powerful organizations either knew what he knew, that aluminum vaccine adjuvants were harmful, or they simply didn’t care. In either case, two possible reasons for the lack of response became clear to Shaw and his colleagues: dogma and money. The first had served to convince most of the world’s medical professionals that Shaw had to be wrong because, after all, “the science was settled.” And, behind much of this was the naked fact of how much money vaccines brought in to cover the pharmaceutical industry’s profit margin. The combination of those two have the finger prints of various Big Pharma companies smudged all over the question of vaccine safety, which included the demonization of both scientists and lay scholars who raised even the tamest questions about safety and the push for vaccine mandates around the world. After these events, Shaw decided to dig deeper. Dispatches from the Vaccine Wars is a comprehensive look at the origin of vaccination and the oversight of vaccines by various regulatory bodies in the United States and in Canada. The book provides not only the official view on vaccines safety and efficacy, but also provides a critical analysis on which such views are based. Aluminum and other compounds that may contribute to autism spectrum disorder are discussed at length. Professor Shaw also analyzes the corporate influences driving vaccine uptake worldwide and provides an in depth look at the push for mandatory vaccination. Dispatches from the Vaccine Wars evaluates the extent to which vaccinology has become a cult religion driving attempts to suppress divergent scientific opinions. Finally, the book delves into the COVID-19 pandemic and what it means for the future of us all.
Vaccines have been one of the most important public health breakthroughs of the last century. Yet despite their ability to save lives, vaccines have become the objects of fear-mongering and fake science. From the groundbreaking polio vaccine to the COVID-19 vaccines produced in record time, Vaccine Wars: When Science and Politics Collide examines why these remarkably successful drugs remain so controversial.
If you have a child in school, you may have heard stories of long-dormant diseases suddenly reappearing—cases of measles, mumps, rubella, and whooping cough cropping up everywhere from elementary schools to Ivy League universities because a select group of parents refuse to vaccinate their children. Between Hope and Fear tells the remarkable story of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases and their social and political implications. While detailing the history of vaccine invention, Kinch reveals the ominous reality that our victories against vaccine-preventable diseases are not permanent—and could easily be undone. In the tradition of John Barry’s The Great Influenza and Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies, Between Hope and Fear relates the remarkable intersection of science, technology, and disease that has helped eradicate many of the deadliest plagues known to man.
"The air was electric at California's Capitol. At a rally on the building steps, one speaker after another railed against a new bill to regulate parents' vaccination choices. If it passed, parents could no longer skirt California's daycare and school vaccine requirements by claiming religious or philosophical objections to vaccines. In response to attempts to eliminate these nonmedical exemptions (NMEs), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shouted to the crowd that "parents know best" when it comes to their children's health. Bob Sears, the pediatrician author of best-seller The Vaccine Book, called on parents to "Get out there and fight for your rights!" Protestors, many of them dressed in red shirts, chanted, "My Child, My Choice." Signs amplified their message: "Force my veggies, not vaccines" and "Protect the Children, Not Big Pharma.""--
"Mass Vaccination comfortably establishes itself as the leading and indeed essential monograph on the history of vaccination in modern China; a much-needed contribution to the history of medicine that will undoubtedly become a textbook in our age of vaccine wars, but which by far surpasses the historiographical needs of the moment by delivering a nuanced and systematic history of mass vaccination in the world's most populous and increasingly powerful country." ― International Journal of Asian Studies While the eradication of smallpox has long been documented, not many know the Chinese roots of this historic achievement. In this revelatory study, Mary Augusta Brazelton examines the PRC's public health campaigns of the 1950s to explain just how China managed to inoculate almost six hundred million people against this and other deadly diseases. Mass Vaccination tells the story of the people, materials, and systems that built these campaigns, exposing how, by improving the nation's health, the Chinese Communist Party quickly asserted itself in the daily lives of all citizens. This crusade had deep roots in the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, when researchers in China's southwest struggled to immunize as many people as possible, both in urban and rural areas. But its legacy was profound, providing a means for the state to develop new forms of control and of engagement. Brazelton considers the implications of vaccination policies for national governance, from rural health care to Cold War-era programs of medical diplomacy. By embedding Chinese medical history within international currents, she highlights how and why China became an exemplar of primary health care at a crucial moment in global health policy.
"A timely, fair-minded and crisply written account."—New York Times Book Review Vaccine juxtaposes the stories of brilliant scientists with the industry's struggle to produce safe, effective, and profitable vaccines. It focuses on the role of military and medical authority in the introduction of vaccines and looks at why some parents have resisted this authority. Political and social intrigue have often accompanied vaccination—from the divisive introduction of smallpox inoculation in colonial Boston to the 9,000 lawsuits recently filed by parents convinced that vaccines caused their children's autism. With narrative grace and investigative journalism, Arthur Allen reveals a history illuminated by hope and shrouded by controversy, and he sheds new light on changing notions of health, risk, and the common good.
In this provocative look at the US military from the Persian Gulf War through the 2003 invasion of Iraq, investigative journalist Gary Matsumoto contends that an anthrax vaccine dispensed by the Department of Defense was the cause of Gulf War Syndrome and the origins of a massive cover-up. Matsumoto calls it the worst friendly-fire incident in military history. A skillfully-woven narrative that serves as a warning about this man-made epidemic, Vaccine A is a much needed account of just what went wrong, and why.
