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Stuart Blume, Maya J. Goldenberg, Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise and the War on Science, Social History of Medicine, Volume 35, Issue 3, August 2022, Pages 1049–1050, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkab070
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As COVID-19 vaccination gathers steam, though not everywhere, the fact that not everyone is wholly convinced of the benefits of vaccination is widely publicised. How to understand these doubts, anxieties, or downright refusals? It is nothing new. In the 1970s and 1980s, newly formed groups critical of vaccination became very visible on internet. Because their emergence seemed to parallel declining vaccination coverage a causal relation was posited. Parents who were failing fully to vaccinate their children were being led astray by misinformation they found on internet. There was a clear culprit. That the situation was more complex, as gradually became apparent, was and remains an uncomfortable message for public health. Who or what is to be blamed? If the problem is one of mistrust, then in and of what? Is it the same everywhere? If it arose in the last decades of the previous century, then why then? Material galore for historians and anthropologists interested in public health, and in how processes of globalisation and ‘marketization’ have impacted different societies at different times.
