On October 19, 2021, the FDA authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use in children 5 to 11 years […]
Wearable Immunity: Beauty Lessons from the Pockmarking Era
This pandemic’s “mask wars,” as with the 1918 flu pandemic and HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, have prompted reflections on how […]
The Vaccine at the End of this Pandemic
In the summer of 1952, parents didn’t let their children visit playgrounds, swimming pools were closed, movie theaters shuttered, and […]
The Heifer and Its Lymph: The Animal Vaccine Establishment’s Register Book
Few people I know like working at the UK National Archives. They find it too impersonal, too frigid, too strict. […]
New Medical Tourism on St. Kitts
The late William Halford of Southern Illinois University’s School of Medicine spent his life developing what Hollywood director Agustín Fernández […]
“The Mommy Instinct” and Vaccinations
“Mommy instincts:” that’s what Jenny McCarthy called them.1 You know, those innate feelings you get about your kids when they’re […]
The Anti-Vaccine Movement, Bad Science, and the Rise of Fake News
Fake news was one of the biggest news stories following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. From climate change to abortion, […]
Parental Guilt & STIs: A Historical Look
If you’ve been watching television lately, you’ve probably seen Merck’s recent ads for Gardasil, the most widely used vaccine for […]
How Anti-Vaccine Ideology Crosses the Political Spectrum
Vaccinations have not been a major issue in the 2016 presidential campaign so far, but perhaps they should be. Republican […]
The Resurgence of the Horrific, Harsh, and Ugly Reality of Childhood Diseases: The Inevitable Risk of Forgoing Vaccinations
By Natisha Robb
In “When the Personal Really is Historical (and Scary!),” Jacqueline Antonovich, a gender and medicine historian, described her 21st-century experience with pertussis, a.k.a. whooping cough, an extremely contagious “good old-fashioned Oregon Trail disease” that recently reemerged since its near eradication in the 1970s. While Antonovich suggests a recent surge in the anti-vaccine movement, records unveil a history fraught with ongoing controversy. Before vaccinations became a childhood rite of passage, every family knew someone who lost a child to a now vaccine-preventable disease. Yet despite the magnitude of casualties from smallpox, measles, polio, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis in populations lacking herd immunity, vulnerable communities did not always welcome vaccination campaigns with open arms.