Legal Mobilization and Scientific Knowledge: The Case of Vaccine Critics

• In Event: 241 - Regular Session. Law and Society

Abstract

The rise of anti-vaccine activists in the United States and the U.K. in the last few decades, organized particularly around the claim that autism is a vaccine injury, has been widely noted. But there has been little scholarly attention to vaccine critics as a health social movement that mobilizes around law and legal claims. My ASA paper will be drawn from my book manuscript, Knowing Vaccine Injury, based upon my five years of research into vaccine activism and legal claims-making, drawing on participant observations, primary source documents, legal materials, and interviews. The vaccine debate in the U.S. has been legalized – that is, conducted in the form of lawsuits and legal claims and argued and processed by attorneys, witnesses, and judges. Whether a vaccine caused an adverse event may seem like a medical or scientific question, not a legal one, and so it might seem regrettable or misguided that we had to drag down such questions into the muck of the adversarial courtroom to be batted about by non-experts. But what if we think of vaccines as social and political from the start? Then law and the legal process starts to look like a flexible mediating process for helping us to understand complex debates. I will argue that the legalization of vaccine injury claims has worked fairly well for upholding a social structure in which near-complete vaccine coverage to prevent a wide range of diseases is maintained and promoted through law, policy, and moral suasion.

Author

• Anna Kirkland, University of Michigan