Measles Pandemic, 1988-1992
At the turn of the 1990s, measles swept the world. Vaccine-preventable since 1963, the “first disease” is nevertheless one of the great absentees of a pandemic century that is slow to come to an end, if not to make it the incarnation of a rampant anti-vaccinationism. Through a chronicle of the “crisis” of 1988‐1992, we will return to the process of coproduction between the infection and the technologies that protect against it. In particular, we will address the social dimension of the viral infection in order to understand why mass vaccination, at the heart of a strong eradication effort, is not enough to prevent measles and even contributes to increasing health inequalities that influence its epidemiology in return. The COVID‐19 experience urges us to conduct this kind of retrospective work and to mobilize history as a discipline of public health to better understand the place of vaccination in the viral and contagious past and present. WHO documentation, scientific literature and ethnographic fieldwork will together force an “equal” approach to the spaces and actors involved, bringing together very local experiences and international policies to reveal the pitfalls of an ultra-technologized and very vertical global (public) health.