Shutterstock/Montebasso. All rights reserved.Suspicions and conspiracy theories regarding vaccines have been around as long as vaccines themselves. Vaccines are a powerful and frankly, a scary technology. They are based on placing a version of an often grave disease in the human body, to build up an immune response. In this sense, they carry the potential to create illness instead of preventing it. Most importantly, they are usually administered to a population that is most vulnerable in a physical, social and cultural sense: children.
Since it is usually states that mandate, distribute and sometimes manufacture vaccines, distrust in this obscure and potentially risky technology often maps onto distrust in the state. Anti-vaccination movements in the United States and Europe are good examples of bringing to light the problematic relationships between citizen and state, as are the recent Ukranian polio cases during the breakdown of an administration. In other cases, distrust is toward another state or political power. This is an issue frequently encountered in global eradication campaigns, for instance resistance in recent years to polio vaccination in Northern Nigeria or Pakistan, where some fear that the Sabin vaccine is a tool of sterilization and part of a western scheme to crush local populations.
