Full Description
In Anti/Vax, Bernice Hausman challenges the widespread perception of vaccine skepticism shaped by media, celebrities, and internet misinformation. She explores other motivations behind vaccine hesitancy, including distrust of pharmaceutical companies and the belief that illness plays a role in good health. Seeking to reframe the conversation, she shows that when resistance to vaccination is portrayed as scientific illiteracy, denial of scientific facts, or simply as irrational, we lose opportunities to understand many people's real concerns.
Anti/Vax reveals that resistance to vaccination consolidates a number of cultural issues—from critiques of medicalization to concerns about government overreach—and raises questions about public health norms. Researched and published before the Covid-19 pandemic, Hausman's rich exploration of the cultural themes animating vaccine skepticism continues to illuminate controversies over vaccination today.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Vaccination Stories and Why I Wrote This Book
1. So What Bothers You about Vaccines?
2. Immune to Reason
3. Whom Do You Trust?
4. Being a Responsible Parent
5. Is Vaccine Refusal a Form of Science Denial?
6. What Are Facts, and How Do We Trust Them?
7. Medicalization and Biomedicalization
8. Antimedicine in Theory and Practice
9. Viral Imaginations
10. Anti/Vax
Conclusion: What Vaccination Controversy Can Teach Us about Medicine and Modernity
Notes
Bibliography
Index
