Elena Jarmoskaite

This dissertation explores the current and historical debates surrounding mandatory childhood vaccination in the United States and, more specifically, the visual communication produced to promote anti-vaccinationist views. The contemporary media, science and communication discourses are reviewed in search of an explanation for the centuries-long persistence of vaccination opposition in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence proving both the necessity and the safety of childhood vaccination. 

The research undertaken for this project is found to suggest that the underlying themes in anti-vaccinationist views have remained largely unchanged since the late nineteenth century, with this persistence potentially being explainable by motivated reasoning influencing vaccine-opposing attitudes. On the basis that vaccine hesitancy is found to be dependent on four attitude roots—conspiratorial beliefs, high psychological reactance, disgust sensitivity, and individual/hierarchical worldviews—a methodological framework is established to assess this theory’s validity in the analysis of primary evidence of anti-vaccinationist communication. 

Two historically significant anti-vaccinationist organisations—the nineteenth-century Anti-Vaccination Society of America, and late twentieth to early twenty-first century National Vaccine Information Center—are identified as case studies. Examples of their visual communication targeting parents nationwide are situated in their broader historical context and analysed for the manifestations of potential attitude root triggers. The examples from both periods reveal clear evidence of catering to their audience’s pre-existing attitudes, with the examples showing both expected differences in their form and content, and astonishing similarities in the approaches employed. 

With the acknowledgment that the lack of knowledge about the material’s authorship and the deliberateness of these strategies, and the lack of reliable data about the effectiveness of these communication materials, these results are concluded to still be merely speculative. However, this experimental cross-disciplinary approach is believed to be useful for future research into the employment of visual communication in the spread of scientific misinformation, hopefully paving the way for more effective communication between healthcare providers and recipients.