Preventive moderation: vaccine hesitancy and vaccine selection in Quebec, 1960s-1990s

The Decade of Vaccines is a comprehensive review of the history of vaccines in the Canadian province of Quebec, a province in mutation attracted by alternatives to biomedicine, backed by a dynamic process of hierarchization of health risks. This chapter examines vaccine hesitancy as a spectrum of situated individual and collective behaviors regarding immunization to highlight the vaccine selections that resulted from the political and sanitary emancipation of a society in mutation. The examination of these hesitations determinants brings to light the impact of the political and sanitary emancipation of a society in mutation attracted by alternatives to biomedicine, backed by a dynamic process of hierarchization of health risks. Analysis reveals, apart from the imprint of the new sciences of vaccinology and immunology, the weight of the state disengaging from mass prevention programs, supported in this direction by the hospital-centered healthcare system and the metamorphoses of contemporary public health. It is in these historical contexts that rational, even innovative, and simultaneously plastic and autonomous forms of preventive moderation unfold. The author notes that the return to mandatory vaccination, which has been enforced or implemented here and there in recent years, in the United States as in Europe, cannot constitute a solution to a societal phenomenon that is constantly adjusting. While the exploration of personalized vaccines remains in the realm of utopia and the pandemic risk has once again materialized, it would be good to rethink what public health means and to reinsert with tact, pedagogy and listening vaccination as a common good.

Section: New Horizons for Innovation Studies DOI: 10.4337/9781803925554.00018