In 2017, Minnesota experienced the state’s largest measles outbreak since 1990. The outbreak primarily affected Somali children, whose vaccination rates had been declining over the last decade. Public-health and media responses to the outbreak widely framed Somali populations as undervaccinated, undereducated, and/or influenced social movements, and these interpretations informed much of the public-health and state responses to the outbreak. During the outbreak, Dr. Kari Campeau was working in partnership with a Somali women’s health center in Minneapolis to study how parents were navigating autism diagnoses, and the stories she heard from Somali mothers could not be fully mapped onto such accounts of the 2017 outbreak.

This talk explored seven themes that recurred across stories that Somali mothers told about the outbreak and their vaccine decisions. These themes speak to lived experiences of exclusion from the production of medical knowledge and the benefits of medical progress. Contexts of vaccine decision-making have shifted since the 2017 outbreak, but Somali mothers’ stories speak to enduring and newly urgent challenges and possibilities for the role of vaccination and public health in polarized societies.