Vaccine Wars - The Two-Hundred-Year Fight for School Vaccinations

The first comprehensive history of efforts to vaccinate children from contagious disease in US schools.

As protests over vaccine mandates increase in the twenty-first century, many people have raised concerns about a growing opposition to school vaccination requirements. What triggered anti-vaccine activism in the past, and why does it continue today? Americans have struggled with questions like this since the passage of the first school vaccination laws in 1827.

In Vaccine Wars, Kim Tolley lays out the first comprehensive history of the nearly 200-year struggle to protect schoolchildren from infectious diseases. Drawing from extensive archival sources-including state and federal reports, court records, congressional hearings, oral interviews, correspondence, journals, school textbooks, and newspapers-Tolley analyzes resistance to vaccines in the context of evolving views about immunization among doctors, families, anti-vaccination groups, and school autho