Anti/Vax: Reframing the Vaccination Controversy

by Bernice L. Hausman

Overview

In Anti/Vax, Bernice L. Hausman challenges the widespread perception of vaccine skepticism shaped by media, celebrities, and internet misinformation. She explores other motivations behind vaccine hesitancy, including distrust of pharmaceutical companies and the belief that illness plays a role in good health. Seeking to reframe the conversation, she shows that when resistance to vaccination is portrayed as scientific illiteracy, denial of scientific facts, or simply as irrational, we lose opportunities to understand many people's real concerns.

Anti/Vax reveals that resistance to vaccination consolidates a number of cultural issues—from critiques of medicalization to concerns about government overreach—and raises questions about public health norms. Researched and published before the Covid-19 pandemic, Hausman's rich exploration of the cultural themes animating vaccine skepticism continues to illuminate controversies over vaccination today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501785030
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	09/15/2025
Series:	The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Bernice L. Hausman is the Garner James Cline Professor of Humanities in Medicine and Chair of the Department of Humanities at the Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, Pennsylvania. She is the author of Viral Mothers, Mother's Milk, and Changing Sex.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Vaccination Stories and Why I Wrote This Book
1. So What Bothers You about Vaccines?
2. Immune to Reason
3. Whom Do You Trust?
4. Being a Responsible Parent
5. Is Vaccine Refusal a Form of Science Denial?
6. What Are Facts, and How Do We Trust Them?
7. Medicalization and Biomedicalization
8. Antimedicine in Theory and Practice
9. Viral Imaginations
10. Anti/Vax
Conclusion: What Vaccination Controversy Can Teach Us about Medicine and Modernity
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Elena Conis

Deeply thought provoking, Anti/Vax is an excellent book and a surprising intellectual journey into and across the cultural underpinnings of contemporary vaccination skepticism. Bernice Hausman, as author and narrator, is a masterful guide.

Barbara Katz Rothman

Bernice L. Hausman has provided us with something we as a society needed—an intelligent, thoughtful, nuanced discussion of the 'vaccine controversy.' She helps us think through the media flurry and has produced a... brilliant book!

Tod Chambers

Bernice L. Hausman provides a fresh examination of the anti-vaccine controversy by closely reading the preceding epistemological, social, and cultural discourses within the debate. Anti/Vax is demonstrative of the value of rhetorical analysis in explicating social controversies.

Editorial Reviews

Hausman's work is spot on and deserves a wide readership.

Choice

"Bernice L. Hausman provides a fresh examination of the anti-vaccine controversy by closely reading the preceding epistemological, social, and cultural discourses within the debate. Anti/Vax is demonstrative of the value of rhetorical analysis in explicating social controversies."

Tod Chambers

"Bernice L Hausman has provided us with something we as a society needed—an intelligent, thoughtful, nuanced discussion of the 'vaccine controversy.'She helps us think through the media flurry and has produced a book that speaks to the social sciences andthe humanities.A brilliant book!"

Barbara Katz Rothman

"Deeply thought provoking, Anti/Vax is an excellent book and a surprising intellectual journey into and across the cultural underpinnings of contemporary vaccination skepticism. Bernice Hausman, as author and narrator, is a masterful guide."

Elena Conis