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This chapter explores how contestations around vaccines have affected the Somali community in Minneapolis. Concerns about vaccination in Minneapolis circulate, very specifically, around whether the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine plays a role in the development of autism. Many Somalis are not opposed to vaccination and take a pragmatic approach to the MMR – they wait until their children speak to give them the MMR. Other Somalis are more avowedly vaccine hesitant and choose not to give their children any recommended vaccines. This chapter critiques the implicit racialization within public health presumptions about vaccine noncompliance. Rather than a knowledge deficit or lack of access, Somalis’ resistance to vaccination stems from an embodied distrust of biomedicine, informed by historic practices of scientific racism and racist interactions with health care professionals.

This chapter describes how the racial formations and public health approaches in Canada and the US differentially inform the content and scope of Somalis’ epistemic communities. The chapter explains how expert involvement in the Somali communities and the racial politics of Toronto and Minneapolis shape the outcome of each epistemic mobilization. Some Somalis in Minneapolis forged collaborative projects with local public health officials, and others took up vaccine skepticism in defiance of these collaborations. In Toronto, Somalis’ failure to secure broader resources and attention lent them greater epistemic freedom to pursue cutting edge research on the microbiome.

This introductory chapter presents the philosophical approach used in this book to deal with the problematic epistemic and social consequences of some scientific dissent. It challenges approaches to this problem that focus on finding criteria to identify what the authors have termed normatively inappropriate dissent (NID), and it calls for a reframing of the problem that highlights some of the epistemic and social conditions actually contributing to making NID more damaging: scientific institutions and practices that undermine warranted public trust in science and a misunderstanding of the role of science in policy making. It also offers an overview of the book and specifically describes each of the chapters.

Chapter 10 proposes a second recommendation to deal with the negative adverse effects that normatively inappropriate dissent (NID) can have: it calls for a recognition of the limits of scientific evidence when it comes to public policymaking and for an increased focus on potential differences in the values that underlie policy decisions. It contends that while confusion and doubt about the existing empirical evidence or about its strength can contribute to stalled policies, disagreements about values can also play a significant role. Such disagreements can involve what people take to be valuable, how to interpret shared values, how to weigh conflicting values, and what policies are better for promoting certain valuable goals.

This chapter considers another factor that plays a role in eroding the public’s trust in science: concerns about the negative influence of nonepistemic values in science, particularly in controversial areas of inquiry with important effects on public policy. It shows that the credibility of scientists can be undermined when the public perceives that scientists have a political agenda or will be biased by their own personal or political values. However, to assume that the best way to address this problem is try to eliminate such values from science altogether would be a mistake. Ethical and social values are necessary and important to knowledge production. Consequently, the chapter explores alternative strategies to increase transparency and stakeholder involvement so as to address legitimate concerns about bias and sustain warranted trust in scientific communities.