Anti Vaccination Movement

Despite the current fascination with the anti-vaccination movement, it might come as a surprise that American children actually receive more vaccinations than ever before. Only less than 0.5 percent of children receive no vaccinations at all. In Vaccine Nation, Conis argued that the widespread belief of vaccination is an important part of study on which to be educated. Conis turned her focus to the spread of vaccines in the postwar era when new vaccines targeted the more “milder” diseases of a child’s early years, including measles, mumps, and whooping cough. More recently, vaccines have been developed and promoted to protect against diseases that largely affect adults. Conis proclaimed, “Health officials were blunt in justifying the widespread …show more content…
This act took place amongst some of the most life changing social movements of the seventies. “The Carter immunization initiative captured the essence of everything Jimmy Carter believed about government and its appropriate place in the American health care system.” Public funding for vaccinations increased in the post-war era. Not because the policy-makers realized that the vaccines could dramatically reduce disease, but also because after the beginning of the polio and measles vaccines, it became very obvious that these diseases were easily concentrated in the poorer neighborhoods and among African American and Hispanic populations. In 1977, when the Jimmy Carter administration encouraged the major vaccine initiative, with the hopes of reducing health care costs and increasing vaccination rates amongst the poor, many states supported their mandatory immunization …show more content…
Before Clinton made this program he, “promised a new national program that would lower vaccine prices, extend public clinic hours, reach out to more parents, set up a national tracking system, and ‘be a model of what we can do again to make this government work.’” Clinton’s program went into effect as the nation’s health experts were deliberating on the use of the hepatitis B vaccine. “As state health boards and legislatures began taking steps to mandate the hepatitis B vaccine for infants, kindergarteners, and seventh-graders, many instead attributed these steps directly to the Vaccines for Children Program.” The federal policy recommended to vaccinate children all over the world against hepatitis B. “The state-level policies requiring the vaccine for all children were made possible by the consolidation of federal authority made manifest in the Vaccines for Children