I included a lot of history in today’s Current feature on vaccine exemptions. The piece draws on a talk I gave earlier this week to the constituents of the Council of Foreign Relations. I am told that the video will be available soon.
Since we don’t do footnotes at Current, I thought I would list the sources that informed my piece:
Arthur Allen, Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008).
James Colgrove, State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
James Colgrove, “Between Persuasion and Compulsion: Smallpox Control in Brooklyn and New York, 1894-1902,” Bulleting of the History of Medicine, 78 (Summer 2004), 349-378.
James Colgrove, “‘Science in a Democracy’: The Contested Status of Vaccination in the Progressive Era and the 1920s,” ISIS 96 (June 2005), 167-191.
Elena Conis, Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
John Fea, “Cherry-picking the Bible and using verses out of context isn’t a practice confined to those opposed to vaccines–it has been done for centuries,” The Conversation, October 4, 2021.
Pennsylvania Code 23.84 Exemption from Immunization.
Daniel Rodgers, The Age of Fracture.
Aaron Rothstein, “Vaccines and Their Critics, Then and Now,” The New Atlantis 44 (Winter 2015), 3-27.
Andrew Wehrman, personal e-mail, November 21, 2021.
Michael Willrich, Pox: An American History (New York; Penguin Press, 2011).
What struck me as I did my research was that there is very little written about religious resistance to vaccines. This is largely because it was so rare.
