The success of the polio vaccine was a remarkable breakthrough for medical science, effectively eradicating a dreaded childhood disease. It was also the largest medical experiment to use American schoolchildren. Richard J. Altenbaugh examines an uneasy conundrum in the history of vaccination: even as vaccines greatly mitigate the harm that infectious disease causes children, the process of developing these vaccines put children at great risk as research subjects. In the first half of the twentieth century, in the face of widespread resistance to vaccines, public health officials gradually medicalized American culture through mass media, public health campaigns, and the public education system. Schools supplied tens of thousands of young human subjects to researchers, school buildings became the main dispensaries of the polio antigen, and the mass immunization campaign that followed changed American public health policy in profound ways. Tapping links between bioethics, education, public health, and medical research, this book raises fundamental questions about child welfare and the tension between private and public responsibility that still fuel anxieties around vaccination today.

This book explores the response to a new scientific advance in medicine three hundred years ago to understand how this discourse revealed religious, racial, anti-intellectual, and other ideologies the first time documented vaccinations were introduced in America. This text serves as a case study that examines the historic discourses surrounding the implementation of a new prevention technique, smallpox inoculation, to prevent the devastating epidemics of smallpox that had visited the new colonies since their start on the American continent. Using this detailed analysis of the arguments surrounding the project in early America, the author examines the various arguments that circulated in the 1720s regarding the project. When compared to today’s pandemic, this study argues that Americans over-react and complicate scientific applications not with logical scientific perspectives or even with ethical views, but instead bring exaggerated claims founded on uniquely American historical, religious, racial, territorial, and political ideologies. America’s First Vaccination will be of interest to anyone interested in American history, the history of medicine, cultural studies, and a comparison to current pandemic events.

"The air was electric at California's Capitol. At a rally on the building steps, one speaker after another railed against a new bill to regulate parents' vaccination choices. If it passed, parents could no longer skirt California's daycare and school vaccine requirements by claiming religious or philosophical objections to vaccines. In response to attempts to eliminate these nonmedical exemptions (NMEs), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shouted to the crowd that "parents know best" when it comes to their children's health. Bob Sears, the pediatrician author of best-seller The Vaccine Book, called on parents to "Get out there and fight for your rights!" Protestors, many of them dressed in red shirts, chanted, "My Child, My Choice." Signs amplified their message: "Force my veggies, not vaccines" and "Protect the Children, Not Big Pharma.""--

In this issue of Pediatric Clinics of North America, guest editors Drs. Peter G. Szilagyi, Sharon G. Humiston, and Tamera Coyne-Beasley bring their considerable expertise to the topic of Vaccine Hesitancy. A growing problem even before the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine hesitancy encompasses various factors involving both researchers and practitioners: transparency in research, scientific findings, and governmental programs; effective communication strategies; addressing and understanding cultural, psychosocial, spiritual, political, and cognitive factors; and a willingness to learn the root causes and concerns about vaccine hesitancy. In this issue, top experts address these topics to help you improve vaccine confidence with your patients. - Contains 14 practice-oriented topics including COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, vaccine hesitancy, trust, and culture; social media and vaccine hesitancy; optimizing your pediatric office for vaccine confidence; overcoming vaccine hesitancy using community-based efforts; and more. - Provides in-depth clinical reviews on vaccine hesitancy, offering actionable insights for clinical practice. - Presents the latest information on this timely, focused topic under the leadership of experienced editors in the field. Authors synthesize and distill the latest research and practice guidelines to create clinically significant, topic-based reviews.

Special Report: Medical Cannabis Latin America 2022 is an examination, through the words of sector leaders, of the current state of this growing industry across Latin America as progressive regulatory landscapes emerge and companies look to gain an early foothold.