ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Biopolitical Warfare: the Franco Dictatorship and Vaccine Hesitancy in Spain, 1955-1975

• In Event: The Long-longue Durée of Iberian Science and Medicine

English Abstract

Employing the themes of contested sciences and epistemic disobedience, I examine the origins and praxis of anti-vaccine sentiment in Spain during the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975). My paper opens a new perspective on Spain’s scientific pluralities, assessing the ways the Franco state used religious coding and nationalist rhetoric to exert state control over science. Amid the permanent campaign to distort science to justify its ideological claims, the Dictatorship assailed vaccines as a perilous symbol of modernity, of the toxic (biological) influence of outsiders that threatened Spain’s ostensible exceptionality and standing as a providential nation.

To trace how these anti-vaccine biopolitics affected public health, I look at the (mis)use of polio vaccines. Despite being introduced in 1955, the Franco regime resisted mass vaccination until 1964. During this decade, roughly 20,000 Spaniards, especially children, became infected, government disregard triggering an epidemic. Alongside the ways religion informed vaccine hesitancy, I explore how denialism informed anti-science discourse: as infections soared in the early 1960s, health authorities denied polio even existed in Spain.

In considering resistance to global health, I ask: what were the historical particularities behind vaccine skepticism in Spain? How did vaccine hesitancy in Franco-era Spain compare globally? In the context of Cold War anxieties and rivalries, I argue the Franco dictatorship propagandized modern medicine, using it when convenient to bolster the regime’s image as a reasoned and responsible international actor. Given the recrudescence of anti-vaxxer behavior today, my work frames vaccine hesitancy as part of the long durée of scientific development in Spain.

Author

• Scott Lancaster, University of California, San Diego