A survey instrument for measuring vaccine acceptance

Prioritizing Parental Liberty in Non-medical Vaccine Exemption Policies: A Response to Giubilini, Douglas and Savulescu

Improving nonmedical vaccine exemption policies: three case studies

Since 1990, the number of mandated vaccines has increased dramatically. Today, a fully vaccinated child will have received nearly three dozen vaccinations between birth and age six. Along with the increase in number has come a growing wave of concern among parents about the unintended side effects of vaccines. In Vaccine, Mark A. Largent explains the history of the debate and identifies issues that parents, pediatricians, politicians, and public health officials must address.Nearly 40% of American parents report that they delay or refuse a recommended vaccine for their children. Despite assurances from every mainstream scientific and medical institution, parents continue to be haunted by the question of whether vaccines cause autism. In response, health officials herald vaccines as both safe and vital to the public's health and put programs and regulations in place to encourage parents to follow the recommended vaccine schedule.For Largent, the vaccine-autism debate obscures a constellation of concerns held by many parents, including anxiety about the number of vaccines required (including some for diseases that children are unlikely ever to encounter), unhappiness about the rigorous schedule of vaccines during well-baby visits, and fear of potential side effects, some of them serious and even life-threatening. This book disentangles competing claims, opens the controversy for critical reflection, and provides recommendations for moving forward.

Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America

Most closely associated with the Nazis and World War II atrocities, eugenics is sometimes described as a government-orchestrated breeding program, other times as a pseudo-science, and often as the first step leading to genocide.  Less frequently it is recognized as a movement having links to theUnited States. But eugenics does have a history in this country, and Mark A. Largent tells that story by exploring one of its most disturbing aspects, the compulsory sterilization of more than 64,000 Americans.The book begins in the mid-nineteenth century, when American medical doctors began advocating the sterilization of citizens they deemed degenerate. By the turn of the twentieth century, physicians, biologists, and social scientists championed the cause, and lawmakers in two-thirds of the United States enacted laws that required the sterilization of various criminals, mental health patients, epileptics, and syphilitics.  The movement lasted well into the latter half of the century, and Largent shows how even today the sentiments that motivated coerced sterilization persist as certain public figures advocate compulsory birth control—such as progesterone shots for male criminals or female welfare recipients—based on the same assumptions and motivations that had brought about thousands of coerced sterilizations decades ago.

Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States

Michigan State University has been working to advance the common good in uncommon ways for more than 150 years. One of the top research universities in the world, MSU focuses its vast resources on creating solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges, while providing life-changing opportunities to a diverse and inclusive academic community through more than 200 programs of study in 17 degree-granting colleges.

Michigan State University

Professor Largent is an historian of science, technology and medicine. His research and teaching focuses on the role of scientists and physicians in American public policy. He has written on the evolution-creation debate, the professionalization of American biology, Darwinism, the history of the American eugenics movement, and recent debates over compulsory vaccination. He is the author of Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States (2008), Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America (2012), and Keep Out of Reach of Children:  Reye’s Syndrome, Aspirin, and the Politics of Public Health (2015).

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History of Darwin

Eugenics

History of Science

History of Biology

Vaccine Policy

Student Success

Interim Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education and Dean of Undergraduate Studies

Staff Bio: Mark Largent

During the early decades of the 20th century, the eugenics movement swept Europe and the U.S. eugenicists aimed at improving national or racial stock by eliminating "undesirable" elements. A radical form of this perspective encouraged the Nazi effort to eliminate European Jewry. The American version of eugenics was not so extreme, but it was politically potent at a time when many scientists and intellectuals believed that human social qualities were biologically based. In 1917, the Oregon Assembly enacted a law enabling forced sterilization of "persons with inferior hereditary potentialities." 

In his lecture, Mark Largent, an assistant professor in the OSU Dept. of History, discussed the eugenics movement in Oregon in terms of the sterilization campaign, and relate it to the movement on a national and international scale. Dr. Largent is well known for his scholarship on the history of American eugenics, and has researched many previously untapped resources on eugenics in Oregon.

At Oregon State University, we have observed Holocaust Memorial Week every year since 1987. The breadth and the duration of our effort are unmatched in the Pacific Northwest.  This program grows from the belief that educational institutions can do much to combat prejudice of all kinds, and to foster respect for the diversity that is America, by promoting an awareness of the Holocaust, perhaps the most horrific historical indicator of the high cost of prejudice.  It is particularly important to teach young people about the Holocaust, so that coming generations will not forget the lessons that a preceding one learned at such cost.  This emphasis recalls the motto of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:  "For the dead and the living, we must bear witness."


To learn more about the Holocaust Memorial Program at Oregon State University, please visit http://oregonstate.edu/holocaust/

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