Dr. Conis’s current research focuses on scientific controversies, science denial, and the public understanding of science.
Elena Conis is a writer and historian of medicine, public health, and the environment. Prior to joining the Graduate School of Journalism, she was a professor of history and the Mellon Fellow in Health and Humanities at Emory University and an award-winning health columnist for the Los Angeles Times, where she wrote the “Esoterica Medica,” “Nutrition Lab,” and “Supplements” columns.
Her current research focuses on scientific controversies, science denial, and the public understanding of science, and has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine, and the Science History Institute. Her first book, Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization, received the Arthur J. Viseltear Award from the American Public Health Association and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and a Science Pick of the Week by the journal Nature. She is currently working on a book on science and the public.
Elena is an affiliate of Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society and the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She holds a PhD in the history of health sciences from UCSF; masters degrees in journalism and public health from Berkeley; and a bachelors degree in biology from Columbia University.
Elena Conis examines how we use history, especially that of the polio epidemics, when we discuss the COVID-19 pandemic. Recorded April 14, 2020. / Video republished with YouTube embed permission from Perspectives on Sci Tech Med.
With employers offering free flu shots and pharmacies expanding into one-stop shops to prevent everything from shingles to tetanus, vaccines are ubiquitous in contemporary life. The past fifty years have witnessed an enormous upsurge in vaccines and immunization in the United States: American children now receive more vaccines than any previous generation, and laws requiring their immunization against a litany of diseases are standard. Yet, while vaccination rates have soared and cases of preventable infections have plummeted, an increasingly vocal cross section of Americans have questioned the safety and necessity of vaccines. In Vaccine Nation, Elena Conis explores this complicated history and its consequences for personal and public health.
Vaccine Nationopens in the 1960s, when government scientists―triumphant following successes combating polio and smallpox―considered how the country might deploy new vaccines against what they called the “milder” diseases, including measles, mumps, and rubella. In the years that followed, Conis reveals, vaccines fundamentally changed how medical professionals, policy administrators, and ordinary Americans came to perceive the diseases they were designed to prevent. She brings this history up to the present with an insightful look at the past decade’s controversy over the implementation of the Gardasil vaccine for HPV, which sparked extensive debate because of its focus on adolescent girls and young women. Through this and other examples, Conis demonstrates how the acceptance of vaccines and vaccination policies has been as contingent on political and social concerns as on scientific findings.
By setting the complex story of American vaccination within the country’s broader history, Vaccine Nation goes beyond the simple story of the triumph of science over disease and provides a new and perceptive account of the role of politics and social forces in medicine.