Description
Book SynopsisThe first comprehensive history of efforts to vaccinate children from contagious disease in US schools. As protests over vaccine mandates increase in the twenty-first century, many people have raised concerns about a growing opposition to school vaccination requirements. What triggered anti-vaccine activism in the past, and why does it continue today? Americans have struggled with questions like this since the passage of the first school vaccination laws in 1827. In Vaccine Wars, Kim Tolley lays out the first comprehensive history of the nearly two-hundred-year struggle to protect schoolchildren from infectious diseases. Drawing from extensive archival sourcesincluding state and federal reports, court records, congressional hearings, oral interviews, correspondence, journals, school textbooks, and newspapersTolley analyzes resistance to vaccines in the context of evolving views about immunization among doctors, families, anti-vaccination groups, and school authorities. The resulting
Table of ContentsList of Tables, Figures, and Charts
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. The Long Fight against Smallpox: From Support to Complacency and Opposition
1. The Rise of School Vaccination Laws
2. The National Anti-vaccination Societies and the Schools
3. Taking Schools to Court: The Legal Battles
4. Schools against Vaccination Mandates: A Case Study
Part II. A Sea Change: From Persuasion to Compulsion in the Quest for Herd Immunity
5. Schools and the Campaign against Polio
6. Schools in the Age of Eradication
7. Vaccine Hesitancy and the Rise of Personal Belief Exemptions
8. The Twenty-First-Century Effort to Preserve Immunity in Schools
Conclusion
Appendix. Selected Court Cases and Rulings Cited in the Text, 1830-2021
Notes
Archival and Digitized Sources
Index
