This dissertation theorizes relationships among health publics, medical ethos, and vaccination hesitancy to consider the function of policy communication in relation to public perceptions of U.S. medicine. To do so, I conducted a comparative analysis of official and vernacular rhetorics comprising U.S. mandatory vaccination policy deliberation. In particular, I examined political and professional communication surrounding mandatory health-care worker influenza vaccinations at the national level—and the public backlash that issue generated—to consider the status of private health citizenship, public participation, and medical professionalism for a biotechnological era. As a pragmatic response to something I term biotechnological anxiety, or bioanxiety, this study articulates how concerns born from contextual, systemic factors are encoded into specific rhetorics of health and medicine in exacerbating ways, concerns that health-care workers express in communication about annual vaccinations as a “duty of care.” Insofar as vaccination communication functions as a proxy for other anxieties that undergird contemporary health-care experiences, I conclude that public trust in medicine and the success of this particular medical technology (vaccination) may wane