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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.

Context: In Quebec, Bill 31, adopted on March 18, 2020, extended vaccination to pharmacists. Despite many advantages, this new practice comes with public health issues reinforced in the context of COVID-19. Therefore, it is essential to understand the opportunities and challenges of the participation of community pharmacists in influenza vaccination, from a public health perspective by (i) describing the year of 2020-2021 influenza vaccination offer, (ii) its opportunities and challenges, and (iii) its impact on the accessibility of this service newly offered by pharmacists to the most vulnerable people. Methods: This research is a case study from one of the most affected areas by COVID-19 in Canada: Laval. Our method combines documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with health professionals and public health actors (n = 23). Researchers used a thematic analysis to analyze these results. Results: Most partners (pharmacists, public health administrators) underlined multiple opportunities of this new practice, ie, pharmacists who can vaccinate, particularly for chronically ill patients. However, structural and strategical challenges remain. More specifically, vaccination seemed to only rely on a “first come, first served” basis, which questions public health objectives of vaccination, such as equitable access. Conclusion: The introduction of new actors, such as pharmacists, represents a major opportunity to improve vaccination coverage and reduce the burden of COVID-19 on the health system. However, this delegation of a public health activity to the private sector undoubtedly requires closer coordination with public health institutions.

At the turn of the 1990s, measles swept the world. Vaccine-preventable since 1963, the “first disease” is nevertheless one of the great absentees of a pandemic century that is slow to come to an end, if not to make it the incarnation of a rampant anti-vaccinationism. Through a chronicle of the “crisis” of 1988‑1992, we will return to the process of coproduction between the infection and the technologies that protect against it. In particular, we will address the social dimension of the viral infection in order to understand why mass vaccination, at the heart of a strong eradication effort, is not enough to prevent measles and even contributes to increasing health inequalities that influence its epidemiology in return. The COVID‑19 experience urges us to conduct this kind of retrospective work and to mobilize history as a discipline of public health to better understand the place of vaccination in the viral and contagious past and present. WHO documentation, scientific literature and ethnographic fieldwork will together force an “equal” approach to the spaces and actors involved, bringing together very local experiences and international policies to reveal the pitfalls of an ultra-technologized and very vertical global (public) health.

The influenza pandemic of 1918–1920, which killed 50 000 Canadians, spurred the creation of a federal department of public health. But in the intervening century, public health at all levels has remained, as Marc Lalonde put it in 1988, the “poor cousin” in the health care system (Lalonde 1988, p. 77). Punctuated by sporadic investment during infectious disease crises, such as polio in the early 1950s, public health is less of a priority as the cost of tertiary health interventions rises. While public health potentially involves a broad range of interventions, this paper focuses on the history of public health interventions around infectious disease. COVID-19 has forced us to relearn the importance of maintaining basic infectious/communicable disease control capacity and revealed the cost of our failure to do so. It has also drawn our attention to the intersection between social inequality, racism, and colonialism and vulnerability to disease. In addition to investing in our capacity to contain disease outbreaks as they occur, we must plan now for how to achieve greater health equity in the future by addressing underlying economic and social conditions and providing meaningful access to preventive care for all. This is how we build a truly resilient society. Governments at all levels have recognized the importance of social factors in shaping health and illness for decades. But greater health equity will result only from genuine action on this knowledge. Action will arise from public advocacy in support of prevention, and a new level of engagement and collaboration between affected individuals and communities, public health experts, and governments.

This chapter examines the impact of colonialism on the “invention” of Vietnamese medicine (VM) in the first half of the twentieth century. It focuses more specifically on the legal framework dealing with VM in the interwar period, when Vietnamese nationalism was on the rise and French colonial authorities were assessing the “successes” and “failures” of the Assistance Médicale Indigène (AMI), the colonial health care system established in 1905. I argue that this invention was at the same time pragmatic, programmatic, and ideological; it aimed at “naturalizing” the AMI to adapt it to local medical needs within the imperial framework and French budgetary constraints. Bridging political, institutional, professional, and therapeutic spaces, this article brings into focus the process whereby VM was not only domesticated, but legally defined for the first time and given specific roles within the colonial health care system. Analysing the discourses framing VM as a “traditional,” “complementary,” and “natural” medicine, I explore the different meanings of science, toxicity, and tradition in this context, as well as the issue of accessibility to essential care. I emphasize the participation of the Vietnamese population, especially Vietnamese doctors and healers, in this process. In so doing, this article helps to reconsider the historiography of traditional medicine worldwide and underlines the importance of a postcolonial approach to a much-needed history of so-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Last but not least, it highlights the impact of colonialism on the framing of a “national medicine” that would play a crucial role in post-1954 Vietnam medicalization and nation building.

À l’heure d’un intérêt de plus en plus marqué pour des approches intégratives de la santé et des soins, le présent article dissèque les ressorts de l’engouement pour les médecines dites alternatives et complémentaires dans une perspective historique. Il se penche en particulier sur les significations des concepts qui servent à désigner celles-ci depuis le XIX^{e<sup/> siècle et conteste une évolution linéaire, de leur exclusion franche à leur inclusion progressive. Par là même, l’analyse met en avant le poids d’une co-production signifiante entre biomédecine et « autres » systèmes médicaux dans la médicalisation des sociétés contemporaines, du continent nord-américain à l’Asie orientale.}

“Vaccine hesitancy” is a concept now frequently used in vaccination discourse. The increased popularity of this concept in both academic and public health circles is challenging previously held perspectives that individual vaccination attitudes and behaviours are a simple dichotomy of accept or reject. A consultation study was designed to assess the opinions of experts and health professionals concerning the definition, scope, and causes of vaccine hesitancy in Canada. We sent online surveys to two panels (1- vaccination experts and 2- front-line vaccine providers). Two questionnaires were completed by each panel, with data from the first questionnaire informing the development of questions for the second. Our participants defined vaccine hesitancy as an attitude (doubts, concerns) as well as a behaviour (refusing some / many vaccines, delaying vaccination). Our findings also indicate that both vaccine experts and front-line vaccine providers have the perception that vaccine rates have been declining and consider vaccine hesitancy an important issue to address in Canada. Diffusion of negative information online and lack of knowledge about vaccines were identified as the key causes of vaccine hesitancy by the participants. A common understanding of vaccine hesitancy among researchers, public health experts, policymakers and health care providers will better guide interventions that can more effectively address vaccine hesitancy within Canada.

Abstract Colonial pharmacists bio-prospected, acclimatized, chemically screened, and tinkered with plants and their parts, hoping to create products to supply colonial public health care, metropolitan industries, and imperial markets. This article's approach is to examine the trajectories of expertise of two French colonial pharmacists, Franck Guichard and Joseph Kerharo, to illuminate the history of modern medicinal plant research. Both men studied medicinal plants as part of their colonial duties, yet their interests in indigenous therapies exceeded and outlived colonial projects. We take this “overflow” as our point of departure to explore how science transformed medicinal plant values in French colonial and postcolonial contexts. Our focus is on the relationship between value and space—on the processes of conceptual and material (de-/re-)localization through which plant value is calculated, intensified, and distributed. We study and compare these processes in French Indochina and French West Africa where Guichard and Kerharo, respectively, engaged in them most intensively. We show that their engagements with matter, value, knowledge, and mobility defy easy categorizations of medicinal plant science as either extractive or neo-traditionalist. By eschewing simple equations of scientists' motivations with political projects and knowledge-production, we argue that approaching plant medicine through trajectories of expertise opens up grounds for finer analyses of how colonial power and projects, and their legacies, shaped scientific activity.

"J'ai commencé ce livre à l'été 2014, à l'heure d'une épidémie d'Ebola entraînant le retour sur le devant de la scène d'anxiétés collectives fortes. Cet été fut aussi saturé de discussions polarisées autour des refus du vaccin contre la rougeole dans plusieurs États américains et du décès du comédien Robin Williams, mort volontairement de sa dépression, le "cancer de son âme" ont dit certains. La métaphore du cancer, populaire auprès des médias toujours en quête de sensations fortes, est devenue un outil pour frapper les esprits et appeler à la lutte contre une kyrielle d'organismes pathogènes, que ce soit Ebola ou le terrorisme. La médecine et la santé sont au cœur de nos vies et de nos discours, certes, mais les interrogations entourant le rôle de la première dans la seconde restent nombreuses. C'est de cette relation qu'il sera fait état dans ce livre. Cette petite histoire de la médecine se penche à la fois sur la construction de systèmes de santé, la médicalisation des corps féminins, la (sur)consommation de médicaments et l'éradication des maladies infectieuses ici et ailleurs dans le monde. Elle veut répondre à des questions d'une actualité brûlante : Pourquoi qualifie-t-on de "scientifique" (et moderne) notre médecine? Qui définit la "bonne santé" et selon quels critères? Pourquoi le "Sud" est-il en moins bonne santé que le "Nord"? Comment expliquer l'engouement récent pour les médecines "douces"? Peut-on être en bonne santé sans le concours d'un médecin?"--Laurence Monnais

"The transnational migration of health care practitioners has become a critical issue in global health policy and ethics. Doctors beyond Borders provides an essential historical perspective on this international issue, showing how foreign-trained doctors have challenged--and transformed--health policy and medical practice in countries around the world. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, from immigration records and medical directories to oral histories, the contributors study topics ranging from the influence of South Asian doctors on geriatric medicine in the United Kingdom to the Swedish reaction to the arrival of Jewish physicians fleeing Nazi Germany and the impact of the Vietnam War on the migration of doctors to Canada. Combining social history, the history of health and medicine, and immigration history, Doctors beyond Borders is an impressive selection of essays on a topic that continues to have global relevance."

"The transnational migration of health care practitioners has become a critical issue in global health policy and ethics. Doctors beyond Borders provides an essential historical perspective on this international issue, showing how foreign-trained doctors have challenged--and transformed--health policy and medical practice in countries around the world. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, from immigration records and medical directories to oral histories, the contributors study topics ranging from the influence of South Asian doctors on geriatric medicine in the United Kingdom to the Swedish reaction to the arrival of Jewish physicians fleeing Nazi Germany and the impact of the Vietnam War on the migration of doctors to Canada. Combining social history, the history of health and medicine, and immigration history, Doctors beyond Borders is an impressive selection of essays on a topic that continues to have global relevance."