“Needling Doubts”: Maternalism, Neo-liberalism and Intensive Parenting as the Roots of Vaccine Hesitancy in English-speaking Canada, 1980–2007

Abstract

Since the 1980s, there has been a growing anti-vaccination movement in English-speaking Canada created by a small number of people with alternative understandings of health and medicine, and by parents who believe their children were harmed by vaccination. The anti-vaccination movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was fuelled by growing concerns about environmental toxicity, skepticism about the motivations of the pharmaceutical industry, neo-liberal ideas about health that encouraged patients to take health and health care in their own hands, and the intensive parenting styles characteristic of late twentieth century Canada. To combat vaccine hesitancy, it is vital to understand the arguments of those opposed to vaccination, which are often far more complex and nuanced than the pro-side would like to admit.