Kira Ganga Kieffer's "Unvaccinated Under God"

Kira Ganga Kieffer is visiting assistant professor of religious studies at Fairfield University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America, with the following results:

From page 99:

Fear about girls’ sexuality, purity, and the sanctity of girlhood spread much further than it might have seemed from Gardasil’s media coverage during its first decade on the market. The fact that only two states mandated HPV vaccination for school attendance and that less than half of adolescent girls and boys completed the three-shot vaccination protocol were evidence of Gardasil’s fraught nature, even among doctors…New groups utilized Christian beliefs and rituals to express vaccine hesitancy, but the Gardasil case was not fundamentally more or differently religious than the prior cases in this book.

Page 99 concludes the chapter about Gardasil, the first vaccine marketed to consumers (adolescent girls), which prevented against strains of HPV. Of all the chapters in my book, this one is the least like the others! This is because it focuses on conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians who opposed the morality of this vaccine when it came out in 2006. These groups are traditionally religious and their opposition to Gardasil was driven by a desire to retain strict norms about gender and sexuality.

The majority of Unvaccinated Under God is about how Americans who have been vaccine hesitant have expressed themselves religiously in a very broad sense that is not specific to a well-recognized tradition. I would have to give the Page 99 Test a fail in terms of providing a representative window into my main arguments or evidence. I will say that the Gardasil case study is fascinating and contributes to the book’s thesis, which is that Americans use vaccines as a proxy for larger cultural and religious anxieties.

Visit Kira Ganga Kieffer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue