From jurisdiction to veridiction: Expertise and economization of immunization policy in the United States

Economic valuations play an increasingly important role in contemporary vaccination governance. Focusing on the United States, this paper presents a genealogy of economization in immunization policy. Borrowing from Foucault, it argues that economization occurs in two distinct modalities: juridical and veridical. In the former case, economization serves the purpose of 'doing justice' to an issue or practice. In the latter case, it asks what must be true about the world for an issue or practice to be justified. Drawing on published, archival and oral history sources, we show how immunizations in the United States first became economized in a juridical modality in the 1960s. We then trace their veridical turn in the 1970s by looking at the traffic of ideas and individuals between the Centers for Disease Control and the Harvard School of Public Health.