Book. Against measles, poliomyelitis and many other infectious diseases, the evidence shared by public authorities and the majority of the population has a name: the vaccine. To the skeptics and the refractory, we oppose the reasons for collective immunity and the effectiveness of the method in the prevention of a variety of pathologies.
In Vaccination (Seuil, 240 pages, 22.50 euros), a precise and documented essay, the historian Gaëtan Thomas, member of the Medicine, Sciences, Health and Society Research Center within the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, explains that this consent to vaccination is the result of patient construction carried out by doctors, public authorities and industry. The author dissects how, since the post-war period, consent has hardly encountered any clear resistance until the serious difficulties encountered by the campaign against hepatitis B in 1994.
Gaëtan Thomas goes back to basics by recounting the beginnings of BCG against tuberculosis. It highlights the role of the International Children’s Center, founded in 1949 by pediatrician Robert Debré, as well as the Pasteur and Mérieux institutes, three decisive players in shaping practices. He explains how vaccination schedules have forged social norms and how, also, France’s relations with its former colonies in Africa, subject to severe epidemics, provided ideal ground for the implementation of vaccines, arousing the enthusiasm of a slew of cooperating doctors who would soon be brought to put forward their views in mainland France.
“Politicization of public health”
This story of membership is also that of protest, and the book details the impact of the National League for Freedom of Vaccinations, created in 1954, which strived to highlight vaccine accidents and to challenge those in power. “If the opponents of vaccination took up erroneous ideas (…)they also managed to put their finger on questions that were debated among doctors”, observes the historian. Among other informative chapters, the book traces the evolution of the legal responsibility of the State in terms of compensation for serious adverse effects.
“The increased politicization of public health has exacerbated the moral issues of vaccination”, notes the author, who calls for understanding vaccine policies with a critical mind. By dissecting the difficulties of several campaigns, his analysis leaves aside the major impact of the method on the improvement of health on a global scale in recent decades. Vaccines against Covid-19, to name just a few, have avoided 14 to 20 million deaths in 2021, according to modeling published in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseasesand pulled the world out of two critical years, the full health and economic effects of which have not yet been measured.
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