Anti/Vax: Reframing the Vaccination Controversy by Bernice L. Hausman (review)

At the heart of Bernice Hausman's Anti/Vax is a call to take vaccination skeptics at their word, to take their stories seriously. Drawing from her experience at Virginia Tech's Vaccination Research Group (VRG) interviewing people who do not vaccinate or only partially vaccinate, Hausman argues that while vaccination controversy is understood within popular discourses to be a problem of science denial, it is in fact a problem of social and political disagreement. She proposes that "vaccine skepticism is linked to various beliefs and practices that are actually not unusual in American society, and that such skepticism is sustained by popular suspicions of government, sponsored scientific research, and pharmaceutical companies" (13). This reality, however, is buried under a stalemate in public debates that is only further entrenched by contemporary media and popular literature that groups vaccine skeptics together with climate change deniers and conspiracy theorists. Anti/Vax is Hausman's attempt at moving beyond this impasse, offering a varied history of the particular material conditions that result in the modern vaccine skeptic, alongside a focus on narrative storytelling that highlights the centrality of individual health experience in understanding such subjects.

The book's ten chapters are an expansive study that start by summarizing the long history of vaccination controversies in the United States, and then delve into the contemporary media's take on the modern controversy; the role of parental responsibility in understanding vaccine skepticism; science denialism; poststructuralism and alternative facts; biomedicalization and anti-medicine practices; and even cinematic representations of zombie epidemics. Throughout, Hausman is careful to remain neutral in the debate: her intention is not to "proclaim which side is right, but investigate the controversy itself" (2). She does this tactfully and precisely, wonderfully illustrating how the scientific establishment has failed to address the fears of its skeptics. At the end of Anti/Vax, however, Hausman feels the need to clearly state that she is, despite the book she has written, on the side of vaccination and science. Listening to the stories of health and illness told by those interviewed at the VRG has led her to understand that, when it comes to appeasing vaccination skepticism, "the answer is science and something else" (219; original emphasis). Anti/Vax is a fantastic start in figuring out what that something else might be.

The first chapter offers a quick but detailed history of vaccination concerns in the twentieth century, focusing on concerns brought up since the 1980s. From the start, Hausman clarifies that "there was never a golden age of vaccine acceptance," demonstrating that vaccination skepticism is not entirely linked to the contemporary moment (16). What the chapter truly centers around, however, is demonstrating that there is a wide array of reasons vaccination has become a national issue. Vaccine shortages, inaccessible prices, rumors about the spreading of HIV in Africa, and Gulf War syndrome have all previously caused people to raise concerns about the use of vaccines; these concerns are why governmental policy has been put in place to make vaccination a required practice. Parental belief, however, is what characterizes the contemporary vaccination controversy, and Hausman argues that this is only possible because "other concerns about vaccination were stripped of their authority or believability, or simply stopped being reported on" (34).

This chapter's conclusion sets the stage for chapters 2 and 3, which explore how news media and nonfiction books on vaccination written for the general public single out parental disregard of scientific discourse as the root of the vaccination controversy. Hausman (and her well-acknowledged team of researchers) survey a vast archive of news media in chapter 2 in order to track how the tone of vaccination reporting has changed in the last decade. She concludes that "the narrowing of vaccination concern to the issue of autism causation does not necessarily reflect the range of vaccination worries in the United States" (47). The governmental mandate to vaccinate children for HPV, for example, was contentious specifically...