Vaccination and Its Critics: A Documentary and Reference Guide

摘要

Vaccination and Its Critics: A Documentary and Reference Guide is a very unique item compared to other books written on vaccines and vaccine injuries. Other books such as The Vaccine Controversy (Link, 2005) have specific chapters on each type of vaccine with references provided and information on how each vaccine was developed and used. Vaccination and Its Critics provides the reader with the primary source documents - letters, first-hand accounts of people who have suffered various diseases like polio, newspaper articles, accounts from researchers and more. The e-book version, as here reviewed, gives a broad historical overview of the history of vaccines through these documents with a short analysis after each entry explaining why this contributed to the history and use of vaccines, and where it fits in the context of the broader history being told. There are a few entries for further reading on each topic presented at the end of each segment. This gives the reader a very interesting and personal look at vaccination, and one I have not seen in other reference guides on the issue so far. A book I previously reviewed in these columns entitled Vaccine Injuries: Documented Adverse Reactions to Vaccines (Conte and Lyons, 2014) (RR 2015/270) only gives a very brief historical overview because it is documenting the different adverse reactions reported from vaccinations in that volume. Vaccination and Its Critics complements the two books named above and gives some different perspectives and more historical background on issues from the trustworthiness of the US Food and Drug Administration to why some are sceptical of vaccines today.