Review of anti-vaccine legislative efforts – 1998-2012
The published article that is the core of this post is a review of anti-vaccine legislative efforts– how the success of the anti-vaccine movement in achieving its legislative goals changed over time. The authors use the term “vaccine critiques”, and I will follow their terminology, though I think the anti-vaccine label fits many of the actors they describe.
The peer reviewed article does two extremely valuable things: describes patterns, and suggests a causal explanation. While the authors are, justifiably, confident in their descriptive analysis, they appropriately warn us that their conclusions about causation are tentative. Their points are, however, very plausible.
This post proceeds in three parts: describing the patterns the authors found, describing their causal conclusions, and asking for a wish-list of further research (an easy enough and somewhat unfair things to do when you don’t have to actually do it).
Note: the authors have expressed their willingness to provide the full paper to individuals, upon request. I recommend it. The paper also states that the database will be made available on request.Read More »Review of anti-vaccine legislative efforts – 1998-2012