Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingstone, Steven Epstein and Robert Aronowitz (eds), Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine's Simple Solutions

Extract

Social scientists by and large are trained to be suspicious of the ‘simple solutions’ beloved by the medical and public health establishments. Surely if there was ever a medical intervention that in retrospect seems destined to generate fodder for their analysis, the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine would fit the bill. The vaccine was directed against both sexually transmitted disease and cancer—two categories of disease with strikingly different connotations. It was at the centre of one of the more ill advised campaigns in recent US history to mandate an expensive new vaccine. And it was developed and aggressively promoted by the pharmaceutical giant Merck, elevating further the anxieties raised by ‘Big Pharma’ in the post-Vioxx era.

This volume explores these controversies and raises many more questions in 15 essays provided by 21 contributors who gathered for two interdisciplinary meetings in 2008. Befitting its title, it does not propose any simple explanations. Its authors represent a variety of perspectives that defy easy summarisation or synthesis. Nonetheless, several themes are worth highlighting.