Herding Immunity

Stacy Mintzer Herlihy is a freelance writer and public health advocate based in New Jersey. Herlihy is a Shot@Life Champion and founder of New Jersey Parents For Vaccines. Herlihy’s books include Your Baby’s Best Shot: Why Vaccines are Safe and Save Lives (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), which was a finalist for Foreword Reviews Book of the Year, Teens and Smoking: Your Questions Answered (2020), and Corporations That Changed the World: Disney (2022).

In Herding Immunity, the public health writer, journalist, and advocate, Stacy Mintzer Herlihy tells the fascinating story of the history of vaccines in America. She reminds us how antivaccine activism is not new and even goes back to time of the founding colonies, but then takes us through a golden era when parents saw polio and other vaccines as miracle interventions. However, the last couple of decades have not always been kind to vaccines or the scientists who invented them, explaining in a straightforward way how vaccines became falsely linked to autism and other conditions, and the harassment that some of us in the scientific community have endured especially during the COVID pandemic. It is an excellent summary, an easy read, and one which I think will find a wide audience.

• Chapter One: Viruses Are Not Our Friends. They Hate Children And Everyone Else.Chapter Two: They Bombed Cotton Mather’s HouseChapter Three: The Founding Fathers Were Intensely Pro Vaccine: You’d Be Too If You Had Children Die of SmallpoxChapter Four: Summering With Polio: Life Before the Modern Childhood Vaccination ScheduleChapter Five: The Cutter Incident and The Swine Flu Epidemic That Never Happened: Making Vaccines and Making the Occasional MistakeChapter Six: Maurice Hilleman and His Chickens Save Millions of People a YearChapter Seven: The Drive to the Pediatrician's Office is More Dangerous Than Any VaccineChapter Eight: Some Vaccines are Profitable. Some Are Not. We Can Do a Better Job Providing Access to All of Them.Chapter Nine: The Man Who Made Parenting Harder: The Story of Andrew WakefieldChapter Ten: Why is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Devoting His Life to Cheering On Preventable Diseases?Chapter Eleven: The Anti Vaccination Industry Profits From Spreading Lies on Social MediaChapter Twelve: A Vaccine For Type I Diabetes: Why We Might Have Cures For Diseases That Still Terrify Us TodayChapter Thirteen: Vaccine Voices: Speaking Out For Public HealthChapter Fourteen: Combating Vaccine Hesitancy And Applauding Those Who Go For It: How to Convince People Needless Suffering is a Truly Bad IdeaChapter Fifteen: I Would Get This Vaccine in My Eyeball: How the COVID-19 Vaccine Rescued Us AllChapter Sixteen: Diseases Don’t Stand Still. Neither Does Vaccine Science.BibliographyNotesIndexAbout the Author