Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship With Immunization

Beyond Social Contagion: Associative Diffusion and the Emergence of Cultural Variation

“…Popular accounts often trace the rise of the anti-vaccination movement to a scientific study published by Andrew Wakefield in 1998, and later denounced as "the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years" (Flaherty 2011(Flaherty , p. 1302, which argued for a causal relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism. But, as Conis (2015Conis ( , 2014 cogently argues, this study was the product of brewing skepticism toward immunizations, rather than its catalyst. What is so striking about the anti-vaccination movement is that college educated individuals who are otherwise most receptive to scientific evidence continue to draw on this study, which has since been retracted, while rejecting the dozens of other studies refuting its conclusions.…”

“…Vaccines, in turn, were reframed as toxic rather than safe (Conis 2015). The upper-middle class parents who, in the 1970s, would have enthusiastically vaccinated their children out of a sense of parental responsibility, are today most likely to invoke the same sense of responsibility to justify their objection to vaccinations (Conis 2014). …”

Complexity and controversy in media coverage of Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination: A qualitative content analysis of news coverage in Denmark 2008–2018

“…Since the emergence of vaccination as a public health measure in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, issues such as safety, effectiveness, ethics, and politics of vaccination campaigns have been surrounded by persistent public debate (Durbach, 2005;Blume, 2017;Williamson, 2017;Kinch, 2018). In the second half of the twentieth and into the early twenty-first century, with the industrialization of vaccine production and the establishment of national and global immunization programs, vaccination controversies have been widely reported and sometimes even fueled by the media (Chatterjee, 2013;Newton, 2013;Conis, 2015;Holmberg et al, 2017). The polio vaccine, for example, generally received positive coverage when it appeared in the 1950's but the 1955 Cutter incident, where 200,000 people in the United States were inadvertently injected with live virulent poliovirus due to manufacturing deficiencies, inadequate safety tests, and poor communication, led to public scrutiny of vaccine safety and lawsuits against Cutter Laboratories (Offit, 2005).…”

How can we use the ‘science of stories’ to produce persuasive scientific stories?

“…Childhood vaccines are widely accepted in the medical community as safe and effective for preventing disease (Gust et al, 2008). Global pandemics such as smallpox, polio, pertussis, and diphtheria have either been eradicated from much of the world, or have become less prevalent as a result of widespread adoption of childhood vaccines (Conis, 2014). Vaccination safety in the U.S. has been a public concern since the late 1990s, when medical literature appeared to indicate that a relationship existed between autism and the MeaslesMumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine (Wakefield, 1999).…”

“…Vaccination safety in the U.S. has been a public concern since the late 1990s, when medical literature appeared to indicate that a relationship existed between autism and the MeaslesMumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine (Wakefield, 1999). The so-called "thimerosal scare," which focused on childhood vaccine safety, has resurfaced in recent years with increasing anxiety about immunizations beyond MMR (Conis, 2014). According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the number of individual cases of measles quadrupled in 2014 due to lower childhood vaccination rates in the U.S., with the majority of parents who opted-out of vaccinations stating that their choice was based on fears of vaccine safety, or due to religious beliefs.…”