History of Vaccines

About the Briefing

This handout was created for the AHA’s February 11, 2026, Congressional Briefing offering historical perspectives on vaccines. Panelists Elena Conis (Univ. of California, Berkeley), David Oshinsky (New York Univ.), and Michael Willrich (Brandeis Univ.) the history of vaccines against diseases including smallpox, polio, and measles. The briefing also explored the public’s perception of vaccines and how the role of the federal government in vaccine development and distribution has changed over time.

Chronology

c. 1800 – The smallpox vaccine, named for the cows (from the Latin vacca) that supplied the vaccinia or cowpox virus, is developed.

1898–1903 – A wave of smallpox epidemics spreads across the United States, killing thousands. While some states already have compulsory vaccination laws, more states adopt them.

1902 – Congress enacts the Biologics Control Act, the first federal statute to regulate the production of vaccines and antitoxins.

1905 – In Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), the US Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of state vaccination mandates as a legitimate exercise of the state’s police powers.

1946 – The Communicable Disease Center (CDC, later renamed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is established.

1952 – The first effective polio vaccine is developed by Jonas Salk and his team at the University of Pittsburgh.

1954 – The March of Dimes begins the Salk polio vaccine trials.

1959 – Albert Sabin’s oral polio vaccine is administered to 10 million children in the Soviet Union.

1962 – President John F. Kennedy signs the Vaccination Assistance Act (VAA), the first federal legislation to provide funds to states for broad, large-scale immunization efforts.

1963 – The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) licenses the first measles vaccine, Merck’s Rubeovax.

1963–64 – A massive rubella epidemic sweeps the United States.

1964 – Surgeon General Luther Terry appoints the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), creating the first singular, centralized government authority on vaccine use.

1967 – President Lyndon B. Johnson launches campaign to eradicate measles from the United States in one year, advised by the CDC.

1967-1969 – FDA licenses the first vaccines against mumps and rubella.

Late 1960s – State-level school-entry vaccine mandates expand to include diseases beyond polio and smallpox (significantly, to include measles).

1971 – FDA licenses a combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, Merck’s M-M-R.

1976 – President Gerald Ford’s swine flu vaccination program is halted after documentation of an association between the vaccine and Guillain-Barre syndrome.

1977 – President Jimmy Carter launches the Childhood Immunization Initiative, aiming to vaccinate 90% of American children against seven preventable infections by October 1979.

1979 – Pressure for less-reactive, acellular pertussis vaccines begins to build after publicizing of safety concerns.

1980 – Smallpox is eradicated globally following a long vaccination campaign led by the World Health Organization.

1982 – Activist group Dissatisfied Parents Together, or DPT (now the National Vaccine Information Center, which is not government-affiliated), is founded, advocating for safer vaccines and compensation for vaccine-injured individuals.

1986 – President Ronald Reagan signs the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, establishing the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP).

1988 – NVICP begins to process compensation claims.

1989 – A major measles epidemic begins to sweep the United States.

1991 – ACIP recommends universal hepatitis B vaccination for all infants at birth.

1993 – President Bill Clinton signs the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, creating the Vaccines for Children program to provide free vaccines to all children, regardless of family means.

1995 – ACIP adds Merck’s Varivax, a chickenpox vaccine, to the childhood immunization schedule.

1998 – The Lancet publishes a study (later retracted) proposing a potential link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

1999 – Public concerns about vaccines build as a House subcommittee holds a hearing on hepatitis B vaccine safety, the first rotavirus vaccine is recalled after being linked to a potentially fatal bowel obstruction, and the FDA recommends removing the mercury-based preservative thimerosal from vaccines routinely given to infants.

2000 – The CDC declares measles eliminated from the United States.

2001 – The Institute of Medicine (IOM) releases a report finding no association between the MMR vaccine and autism.

2006 – ACIP recommends the new human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine, Gardasil, be administered to girls ages 11–12; controversy erupts.

2008 – US Court of Federal Claims issues ruling finding that a 9-year-old girl’s autism-like symptoms were triggered by an underlying mitochondrial condition aggravated by the MMR and DTaP vaccines.

2010 –President Barack Obama signs the Affordable Care Act, which requires most private health insurance plans and Medicaid to cover the cost of ACIP-recommended vaccines. The Lancet retracts the 1998 paper on the relationship between MMR and autism, following findings of undisclosed conflicts of interest, data manipulation, and ethics violations.

2014 – A multistate measles outbreak begins in California, spreading to Mexico and Canada.

2015 – California passes Senate Bill 277, ending the personal-belief exemption for state-mandated childhood vaccines; other states follow suit.

2020 – President Donald Trump announces Operation Warp Speed to develop vaccines to curb the COVID-19 pandemic.

2021 – FDA approves the first COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer’s COMIRNATY.

2025 – Ongoing measles cases and outbreaks in the United States threatens the nation’s measles elimination status.

January 2026 – CDC reduces its universally recommended immunizations from 17 to 11. ACIP chair Kirk Milhoan states that the polio and measles vaccines, and possibly all vaccines, should be optional and offered only in consultation with a clinician.

The First Vaccines

• Smallpox, an infectious disease caused by the variola virus, was one of the deadliest diseases in world history. In a typical outbreak, the disease killed 25–30% of those infected.
• Since the mid-19th century, state and local vaccine orders have been carried out under the authority of the police power—the right of the state, under the common law and the Constitution, to regulate individual liberty and property rights when the public welfare demands it.
• Smallpox spread across the United States between 1898 and 1903, killing thousands and disrupting local economies.
• Throughout the 1898–1903 epidemics, local, state, and federal health officials enforced vaccination aggressively—sometimes using force—at the nation’s borders, along its railroad lines, and in its public schools, factories, and tenement districts.
• During this wave of epidemics, Americans opposed to compulsory vaccination responded. They formed local antivaccination leagues and contributed to a large transatlantic antivaccination literature. They mobilized in statehouses to pass laws limiting or banning compulsory vaccination. They challenged compulsory vaccination in the courts, carrying the vaccination question to the US Supreme Court in 1905. They also resisted in less formal political ways: they slid out the backdoor when vaccinators showed up; they rioted in the tenements, in the streets, and at factories; and they forged vaccination certificates so unvaccinated children could attend school.
• Smallpox killed an estimated 300 million people worldwide in the 20th century.
• Smallpox was eradicated globally by 1980 following a long vaccination campaign led by the World Health Organization.

Polio: The Dread Disease of the Mid-20th Century

• Polio is caused by a virus. It travels from the mouth to the gut and is usually excreted without consequence. In a small number of cases, the virus enters the bloodstream and moves into the nervous system, causing severe paralysis and even death.
• Polio became epidemic in the 20th century and only in the developed world. In that sense, it is unique. While endemic for centuries in Asia and Africa, it hit the United States and Western Europe particularly hard in the 1930–50s.
• Until vaccines were developed, there was no prevention; everyone was at risk. At its height in 1952, the United States recorded close to 60,000 cases, including 21,000 that were paralytic and about 3,000 deaths.
• Polio is a very visual disease. Children on crutches, in leg braces, and in iron lungs dramatically increased public anxiety.
• In 1954, the March of Dimes, created by polio survivor President Franklin Roosevelt, began the famous Salk vaccine trials. More than a million schoolchildren took part—the largest public health experiment in American history. The trials were “double-blind,” meaning that neither the child, nor the caregiver, knew whether the child had received the inactivated “killed virus” vaccine or a look-alike placebo. The results were stunning: the vaccine turned out to be “safe, potent, and effective.”
• Equally stunning is the fact that millions of parents allowed their children to take part in experimental trials, and millions more would have done so had they been given the opportunity. President Eisenhower invited Jonas Salk to the White House, thanking the young researcher for “saving the children of the world.”
• A second polio vaccine, developed by Albert Sabin, was successfully tested in the Soviet Union. Sabin’s was an oral vaccine given via sugar cube or a dropper—cheaper and requiring no needles.
• By the 1970s, polio had virtually disappeared in the Western world. The United States has experienced one polio case in the past 40 years—an unvaccinated man who likely brought the virus back with him from a trip abroad.
• The polio vaccine is the gold standard in battling infectious disease. It has saved untold numbers of children from paralysis and death. A 2025 poll by the Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation found that 81% of parents support mandates for measles and polio vaccines while 18% do not (with 1% unrecorded.). 81% is right at the level of herd immunity required to protect against polio and well below the level required to protect against measles, which has seen a resurgence in the United States in recent years.
• The virus is still circulating in parts of the globe; an end to vaccine mandates makes polio likely to reappear.

Vaccination Acceptance and Resistance, 1960s–2010s

• In the 1960s, a modern era of vaccination dawned, marked by four key characteristics:
  • proactive federal leadership in vaccination research and policy;
  • belief in disease eradication via vaccination;
  • a focus on vaccinating against the “mild” infections, those considered less severe and less deadly than the earlier vaccination targets smallpox, diphtheria, and polio; and
  • increasing reliance on vaccination of children and its enforcement through school laws as a means of protecting the greater public from infectious disease.
• In the 1970s, as childhood vaccination enforcement against a range of infections expanded, a new movement of vaccination resistance emerged and grew, informed by both older libertarian movements and the new liberal social movements of the postwar era.
• The 1980s saw record-high vaccination rates against childhood infections, federal disinvestment from vaccination policy and activities, and the formation of an organized vaccine critical movement that successfully advocated for the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.
• In the 1990s, multiple new vaccines were added to the childhood vaccination schedule.
• Vaccination was placed at the center of federal health reform efforts with the creation of the Vaccines for Children Program in 1993 to provide recommended immunizations to all children, regardless of ability to pay.
• In the 2000s, measles was officially eliminated from the US via vaccination, even as vaccine fears and antipharmaceutical industry backlash helped fuel vaccination resistance, leading in part to increasing use of state-level vaccination exemptions.
• Growing measles outbreaks in the 2010s, especially one originating at Disneyland in late 2014, inspired California to end its personal-belief exemption to vaccination in 2015, with other states following suit to tighten vaccination laws.
• 2020’s Operation Warp Speed resulted in record-setting acceleration of vaccine development to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. The emergency-authorized mRNA vaccines function differently than other types of vaccines and are now at the center of worsening vaccination fears and resistance.

Watch the Recording

The recording of the briefing is available to watch on Youtube.

Participant Biographies

Elena Conis is professor of journalism and history at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarship and writing examine the history of controversies in public health and medicine. She is the author of the books Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization; How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT; and, with Aimee Medeiros and Sandra Eder, the edited volume Pink and Blue: Gender, Culture and the Health of Children. At Berkeley, she serves as director of the Narrative Writing Program and on the Steering Committee of the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public and was formerly acting dean of Berkeley Journalism. Prior to joining the Berkeley faculty, she was a history professor and Mellon Foundation Fellow in Health Humanities at Emory University and an award-winning health columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

David Oshinsky is director of the Division of Medical Humanities at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine and a professor in the NYU Department of History. His book Polio: An American Story won the Pulitzer Prize in History and the Hoover Presidential Book Award. His other books include Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy, and Worse Than Slavery. Oshinsky’s articles and reviews appear in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Review of Books, among other publications.

Michael Willrich is the Leff Families Professor of History and chair of the history department at Brandeis University. His teaching and research center on American social and legal history. He is the author of City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (2003), Pox: An American History (2011), and American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the U.S. Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (2023), which was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in History.