America's New Vaccine Wars: California and the Politics of Mandates

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.

Author: Mark C. Navin, Katie Attwell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 08/04/2023
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.50w x 1.80d
ISBN: 9780197613238


Review Citation(s):
Choice 09/01/2024

About the Author
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 "I Immunise" campaign, which drew on behavioral insights to address alternative lifestyle-based vaccine hesitancy in Fremantle, Western Australia. She leads the interdisciplinary Western Australian project "Coronavax: Preparing Community and Government," 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.