Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on Science by Maya J. Goldenberg (review)

10 Heather Munro Prescott argues that, throughout the twentieth century, anxieties about social change shaped both scientific and popular understandings of what constituted “normal” adolescent development. Prescott traces the increasing medicalization of puberty as children whose physical and mental development fell outside of standardized norms became “targets of new medical treatment” (p. 175), concluding with a look at current debates surrounding pharmaceutical interventions intended to delay puberty for trans children. In the volume’s final essay (Chapter 11) Laura Mamo and Ashley E. Pérez examine campaigns in support of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, introduced in 2006 and initially promoted as an effective means to reduce adolescent girls’ future risk of cervical cancer. The vaccine’s advocates then “degendered” their discourses as they identified additional populations at risk of contracting HPV through sexual activity and developing other HPV-associated cancers. But these discourses became “regendered,” when low vaccine uptake among boys and MSM led to relying once again on vaccinating adolescent girls--an inequitable medical and moral burden. The authors assert that the recent history of HPV vaccine campaigns reveals how “pediatrics gets entangled in public health and adult health care through vaccination policy, promotion, and marketing” (p. 200). Their analysis also highlights the historical dialectic between gender and pediatrics as it continues to shape children’s health care in the present.