ABSTRACT
Trying to explain why during the autumn of 2009 public opinion in most wealthy countries rejected the H1N1 flu vaccine, Dr Oshinsky, professor of history at the University of Texas, may have offered one important clue. Comparing the present day campaign with polio vaccine trials of 1954, in which American parents volunteered more than a million children to receive either an experimental vaccine or a placebo, he said: ‘They also had lived through virulent epidemics. That to me is probably the biggest issue of all. [Nowadays] You’re dealing with parents who’ve never seen a smallpox epidemic, a polio epidemic’ (Klass, 2009, D5). People today have completely forgotten what epidemics were like in former days, thanks to vaccination.
