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Bioethics Lecture
Sponsored by Drs. Gerald and Ruth Fischbach
07/26/07 - 4:00 PM - Lillie Auditorium
"Vaccination and its Discontents"
Arthur Allen, author of VACCINE: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver
A public reception at the Swope Center lower terrace will immediately follow the lecture.
Ever since Cotton Mather introduced vaccination to Boston in 1721, the procedure has been controversial. Anti-vaccination movements gained strength after the legality of compulsory vaccination was confirmed by the Supreme Court in 1905 in Jacobson v. Massachusetts. The case of Henning Jacobsen, a Lutheran minister who had refused vaccination during a smallpox epidemic, galvanized the anti-vaccine movement. Vaccine-related illnesses, including tetanus, were common in that era of pioneering bacteriology. And a milder form of smallpox was starting to predominate in much of the country, which changed the risk/benefit equation for people contemplating vaccination. Concern about bad vaccines and rebellious parents give birth in 1902 to the U.S. Hygienic Laboratory, which regulated vaccine production and was the first forerunner of the Food and Drug Administration. It is no coincidence that the anti-vaccine agitation and vaccine regulation have gone hand in hand. In the 1980s, Congress created the federal vaccine compensation program to shield the pharmaceutical industry from lawsuits arising from the use of the whole cell pertussis vaccine. This summer, the court is hearing the cases of 5,000 autistic spectrum children whose parents blame vaccines for the condition. The thimerosal cases are an example of parents’ minds being poisoned by the Internet more than their children poisoned by vaccines. But they reflect how important it is for the government to fund good science to counter superstition and those who take advantage of it—such as trial lawyers, quacks, and sophisticated nostrum peddlers.
Arthur Allen was born in Cincinnati in 1959 and attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received an A.B. in Development Studies in 1981. He spent four years in Mexico and Central America, including a three-year stint as The Associated Press (AP) correspondent in El Salvador. Arthur later worked for the AP as an editor in New York and a reporter in France and in Germany, with occasional trips to the Balkans and Africa. Since 1995 he has written mostly about the biological sciences and medicine for general-interest publications such as The New York Times, Washington Post, The New Republic, Mother Jones, Slate.com and WebMD. His book Vaccine: the Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver was published in January by WW Norton and has been favorably reviewed in many publications. He is currently at work on a history of the tomato. Allen lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, New Yorker staff writer Margaret Talbot, and their children Ike and Lucy.
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