Anti-vaxxers

Author: Jonathan M. Berman
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262539322
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
A “clear and insightful” takedown of the anti-vaccination movement, from its 19th-century antecedents to modern-day Facebook activists—with strategies for refuting false claims of friends and family (Financial Times) Vaccines are a documented success story, one of the most successful public health interventions in history. Yet there is a vocal anti-vaccination movement, featuring celebrity activists (including Kennedy scion Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and actress Jenny McCarthy) and the propagation of anti-vax claims through books, documentaries, and social media. In Anti-Vaxxers, Jonathan Berman explores the phenomenon of the anti-vaccination movement, recounting its history from its nineteenth-century antecedents to today’s activism, examining its claims, and suggesting a strategy for countering them. After providing background information on vaccines and how they work, Berman describes resistance to Britain’s Vaccination Act of 1853, showing that the arguments anticipate those made by today’s anti-vaxxers. He discusses the development of new vaccines in the twentieth century, including those protecting against polio and MMR (measles, mumps, rubella), and the debunked paper that linked the MMR vaccine to autism; the CDC conspiracy theory promoted in the documentary Vaxxed; recommendations for an alternative vaccination schedule; Kennedy’s misinformed campaign against thimerosal; and the much-abused religious exemption to vaccination. Anti-vaxxers have changed their minds, but rarely because someone has given them a list of facts. Berman argues that anti-vaccination activism is tied closely to how people see themselves as parents and community members. Effective pro-vaccination efforts should emphasize these cultural aspects rather than battling social media posts.

Vaxxers

Author: Sarah Gilbert
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781529369878
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
'An enthralling tale of toil, tenacity and triumph' RACHEL CLARKE This is the story of a race - not against other vaccines or other scientists, but against a deadly and devastating virus. On 1 January 2020, Sarah Gilbert, Professor of Vaccinology at Oxford University, read an article about four people in China with a strange pneumonia. Within two weeks, she and her team had designed a vaccine against a pathogen that no one had ever seen before. Less than 12 months later, vaccination was rolled out across the world to save millions of lives from Covid-19. In Vaxxers, we hear directly from Professor Gilbert and her colleague Dr Catherine Green as they reveal the inside story of making the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine and the cutting-edge science and sheer hard work behind it. This is their story of fighting a pandemic as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Sarah and Cath share the heart-stopping moments in the eye of the storm; they separate fact from fiction; they explain how they made a highly effective vaccine in record time with the eyes of the world watching; and they give us hope for the future. Vaxxers invites us into the lab to find out how science will save us from this pandemic, and how we can prepare for the inevitable next one.

Vaxxers

Author: Sarah Gilbert
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1529369894
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Book Description
Chosen as a Book of the Year 2021 by the Financial Times, Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Prospect, Guardian and The Times. 'Vaxxers is so good that the book will be read for long after the pandemic is over' Financial Times 'One of the most epic and pioneering moments in human history' Sir Jeremy Farrar __________ The bestselling inside story of a historic moment for science and for humanity. On 1 January 2020, Professor Sarah Gilbert read an article about four people in China with an illness of unknown cause. Within two weeks, she and her team had designed a new vaccine that would go on to save millions of lives from Covid-19. Capturing a landmark moment, Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green reveal their story of making the pioneering Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine and fighting a pandemic as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. They separate fact from fiction, they explain how they made their highly effective vaccine in record time with the eyes of the world watching, and they give us hope for the future.

Until Proven Safe

Author: Nicola Twilley
Publisher: MCD
ISBN: 0374715335
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley have been researching quarantine since long before the COVID-19 pandemic. With Until Proven Safe, they bring us a book as compelling as it is definitive, not only urgent reading for social-distanced times but also an up-to-the-minute investigation of the interplay of forces–––biological, political, technological––that shape our modern world. Quarantine is our most powerful response to uncertainty: it means waiting to see if something hidden inside us will be revealed. It is also one of our most dangerous, operating through an assumption of guilt. In quarantine, we are considered infectious until proven safe. Until Proven Safe tracks the history and future of quarantine around the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through time and space—from the crumbling lazarettos of the Mediterranean, built to contain the Black Death, to an experimental Ebola unit in London, and from the hallways of the CDC to closed-door simulations where pharmaceutical execs and epidemiologists prepare for the outbreak of a novel coronavirus. But the story of quarantine ranges far beyond the history of medical isolation. In Until Proven Safe, the authors tour a nuclear-waste isolation facility beneath the New Mexican desert, see plants stricken with a disease that threatens the world’s wheat supply, and meet NASA’s Planetary Protection Officer, tasked with saving Earth from extraterrestrial infections. They also introduce us to the corporate tech giants hoping to revolutionize quarantine through surveillance and algorithmic prediction. We live in a disorienting historical moment that can feel both unprecedented and inevitable; Until Proven Safe helps us make sense of our new reality through a thrillingly reported, thought-provoking exploration of the meaning of freedom, governance, and mutual responsibility.

Between Hope and Fear

Author: Michael Kinch
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1681778203
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 486

Book Description
If you have a child in school, you may have heard stories of long-dormant diseases suddenly reappearing—cases of measles, mumps, rubella, and whooping cough cropping up everywhere from elementary schools to Ivy League universities because a select group of parents refuse to vaccinate their children. Between Hope and Fear tells the remarkable story of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases and their social and political implications. While detailing the history of vaccine invention, Kinch reveals the ominous reality that our victories against vaccine-preventable diseases are not permanent—and could easily be undone. In the tradition of John Barry’s The Great Influenza and Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies, Between Hope and Fear relates the remarkable intersection of science, technology, and disease that has helped eradicate many of the deadliest plagues known to man.

Anti/Vax

Author: Bernice L. Hausman
Publisher: ILR Press
ISBN: 1501735632
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
Antivaxxers are crazy. That is the perception we all gain from the media, the internet, celebrities, and beyond, writes Bernice Hausman in Anti/Vax, but we need to open our eyes and ears so that we can all have a better conversation about vaccine skepticism and its implications. Hausman argues that the heated debate about vaccinations and whether to get them or not is most often fueled by accusations and vilifications rather than careful attention to the real concerns of many Americans. She wants to set the record straight about vaccine skepticism and show how the issues and ideas that motivate it—like suspicion of pharmaceutical companies or the belief that some illness is necessary to good health—are commonplace in our society. Through Anti/Vax, Hausman wants to engage public health officials, the media, and each of us in a public dialogue about the relation of individual bodily autonomy to the state's responsibility to safeguard citizens' health. We need to know more about the position of each side in this important stand-off so that public decisions are made through understanding rather than stereotyped perceptions of scientifically illiterate antivaxxers or faceless bureaucrats. Hausman reveals that vaccine skepticism is, in part, a critique of medicalization and a warning about the dangers of modern medicine rather than a glib and gullible reaction to scaremongering and misunderstanding.

Calling the Shots

Author: Jennifer A. Reich
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479874833
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
An increasing number of parents are refusing vaccines, believing vaccines pose greater risks than benefits to their children. Given the certainty of the medical community that vaccines are safe and effective, many wonder how such parents, who are most likely to be white, have high levels of education, and have the greatest access to healthcare services and resources, could hold such beliefs? Reich has been following the issue of vaccine refusal for over a decade, and examines how parents who opt out of vaccinations see their decision: what they fear, what they hope to control, and what they believe is in their child's best interest. -- adapted from back cover

Deadly Choices

Author: Paul A. Offit
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465057969
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Book Description
A renowned researcher vigorously challenges the anti-vaccine movement in this powerful defense of science in the face of fear.

Fitting Things Together

Author: Alex Worsnip
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197608140
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
Some combinations of attitudes-beliefs, credences, intentions, preferences, hopes, fears, and so on-do not fit together right: they are incoherent. A natural idea is that there are requirements of 'structural rationality' that forbid us from being in these incoherent states. Yet many philosophers have recently attempted to minimize or eliminate structural rationality, arguing that it is just a 'shadow' of 'substantive rationality' - that is, correctly responding to one's reasons. In 'Fitting Things Together', Alex Worsnip pushes back against this trend, providing a sustained defense of the view that structural rationality is a genuine, autonomous, unified, and normatively significant phenomenon.

The Doctor Who Fooled the World

Author: Brian Deer
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421438011
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Book Description
Investigative reporter Brian Deer exposes a conspiracy of fraud and betrayal behind attacks on a mainstay of medicine: vaccinations. 2021 IPPY Book Award Winner (Gold) in Health/Medicine/Nutrition, Recipient of the Eric Hoffer Award for Nonfiction in the Culture Category. From San Francisco to Shanghai, from Vancouver to Venice, controversy over vaccines is erupting around the globe. Fear is spreading. Banished diseases have returned. And a militant "anti-vax" movement has surfaced to campaign against children's shots. But why? In The Doctor Who Fooled the World, award-winning investigative reporter Brian Deer exposes the truth behind the crisis. Writing with the page-turning tension of a detective story, he unmasks the players and unearths the facts. Where it began. Who was responsible. How they pulled it off. Who paid. At the heart of this dark narrative is the rise of the so-called "father of the anti-vaccine movement": a British-born doctor, Andrew Wakefield. Banned from medicine, thanks to Deer's discoveries, he fled to the United States to pursue his ambitions, and now claims to be winning a "war." In an epic investigation spread across fifteen years, Deer battles medical secrecy and insider cover-ups, smear campaigns and gagging lawsuits, to uncover rigged research and moneymaking schemes, the heartbreaking plight of families struggling with disability, and the scientific scandal of our time.