From Settled Consensus to Uncertainty: Polio’s Postmodern Travels

Abstract: Resurgence of vaccination controversy concerning polio caught many in the public health community by surprise. Long used as an emblem of vaccine effectiveness and public confidence, polio vaccination seemed immune to vaccine skepticism. Yet even polio’s dominant narrative of mid-twentieth-century scientific triumph has not made it invulnerable to changing public sentiment.

Polio has shifted from a story of modernist triumph to one of postmodern skepticism. Scrutinizing polio and polio vaccination points to both continuities and ruptures in vaccination controversy, providing important lessons for vaccine programs for the future. Bringing together four distinguished scholars, this panel offers three responses to the question “Why has polio vaccination become contested in the 2020s?” and a discussant.

The first paper provides a broad historical background for understanding vaccine resistance, addressing the question, “How does the history of vaccine resistance inform the emerging concerns about polio vaccination?”

The second paper addresses how polio and polio vaccination became a way to articulate anxieties about vaccine skepticism in the 2024 presidential election. While Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s views on MMR and HPV vaccines were well known, it was his questioning of polio vaccination that became a way to signify his unfitness for that office for those who opposed him.

The third paper examines current efforts to eradicate polio globally, looking specifically at how the evolving epidemiology of polio complicates that goal. The complexity of current efforts and their untoward side effects belie the dominant narrative of polio vaccination and demonstrate how eradication efforts contribute to current controversy.

Keywords: vaccine resistance, vaccination, polio