I picked this book up because vaccination is something I knew very little about, and it's something everyone should know a very lot about. This is stuff we inject into our bodies, and into those of our children, and we do so because we trust the medical industry that recommends it. But when an industry (particularly Big Pharma) is shown to value profit over human life, is it right to trust them anymore?

With Vaccine Nation, Conis answers some questions I had about immunization and its impact on society. She does a thorough job of giving the history of vaccines in the United States from Jonas Salk's polio vaccine up to 2015 when this book was written. What I think I like most about this text is that I could never truly tell which side of the argument that Conis fell on, and this is an attribute that any informative non-fiction book should boast. She lays out hundreds, maybe thousands, of facts, all backed up by a huge bibliography, and she allows the reader to decide for themselves what side of the fence they wish to jump on. To her credit, she even managed to move my opinions more towards the middle than they otherwise would have been.

The only thing that Conis really leaves out is the hard-core science behind vaccines. She explains their workings enough that a reader has an understanding of how they work at basic levels, but she doesn't weigh the text down with complicated formulas or theories. This is good because it sparks curiosity about those higher levels of knowledge that I may now go and seek. Her writing is academic, for sure, but it is never the un-readable jargon that many books like this can be.

This is an important book for parents and anyone concerned about what it means to be protected from disease. I recommend it and will be curious to read others like it.