Overview

Bioethicist Mark Navin and policy scholar Katie Attwell explore the evolution of American childhood vaccination policy through the prism of political history, contemporary parenthood, and diverse governance strategies. America's New Vaccine Wars focuses on the origins and the outcomes of America's recent efforts to eliminate nonmedical exemptions to school and daycare vaccine mandates. These policy developments have increased immunization rates, but they have also ignited polarizing, nationwide debates about parents' rights, democracy, and the authority of the government to use coercion to promote health. This book explores the meaning of these battles for parents, doctors, the politics of public health, and the future of bioethics.Navin and Attwell ground the book with a case study of California's efforts to exclude unvaccinated children from school and daycare following the Disneyland Measles Outbreak of 2014. The authors use original interviews with key policymakers and activists to explain the development and execution of California's new vaccination policies, and they connect California's immunization policy developments to similar efforts across America and in other countries. America's New Vaccine Wars is a story about how political and community actors fought to exclude unvaccinated children from school in the face of significant opposition and failing public health institutions. The book unpacks the meaning and impact of these efforts for broader debates about America's immunization governance, including conflicts about coercive public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Full Product Details

9780197613238

Table of Contents

Reviews

America's New Vaccine Wars is a timely and important addition to the literature on vaccination policy. Navin and Attwell provide a comprehensive overview of the events leading up to California's elimination of non-medical exemptions to school vaccination requirements and what has happened since that time, along with a nuanced discussion of the legal and ethical issues surrounding vaccination requirements and vaccine policy. The interdisciplinary approach- history, law, ethics, philosophy, psychology, politics- enhances our understanding of the complex issues related to vaccine policy. This book should be required reading for those interested in and involved with the ethical and policy issues surrounding vaccination. * Douglas S. Diekema, University of Washington School of Medicine * Meticulously researched and carefully argued, America's New Vaccine Wars grapples with some of the most complex and urgent public policy issues of our time: the relationship between the people and their government, trust in medical and scientific authority, and what we all owe to each other in the name of public health. Navin and Attwell's nuanced account resists easy explanations and provides clear guidance for policy makers. This is a superb case study of the political, legal, and ethical dimensions of public health. * James Colgrove, Columbia Mailman School of Public Health * This book nicely blends sociological, historical, and philosophical considerations in an overarching account of vaccine mandates in California. However, the issues raised here are relevant to political and sociological reflection on vaccine mandates more broadly. Discussing vaccination policy after the COVID-19 pandemic will require the kind of interdisciplinarity and depth of analysis of which this book is a perfect example. * Alberto Giubilini, University of Oxford *

Author Information

"Mark C. Navin is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Oakland University, Lecturer in the Department of Foundational Medical Studies at Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine, and Clinical Ethicist at Corewell Health. He is the author of Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Ethics, Epistemology and Health Care (Routledge, 2016). He has led articles that appeared in journals including Pediatrics, Vaccine, American Journal of Bioethics, Hastings Center Report, Bioethics, and Journal of Medical Ethics. Katie Attwell is Associate Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia, and a global expert in vaccine hesitancy and policies for childhood and COVID-19 vaccines. Katie has led community, policy, and behavioral research in vaccination uptake since 2014, the year of her ground-breaking "" campaign, which drew on behavioral insights to address alternative lifestyle-based vaccine hesitancy in Fremantle, Western Australia. She leads the interdisciplinary Western Australian project "" which engages in community and government research for the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out. She has led articles in Nature, Pediatrics, Milbank Quarterly, Vaccine, and Social Science and Medicine."

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available