Africa in the Global Race for a Yellow Fever Vaccine

Abstract The Pastorian yellow fever vaccine project interacted with British and American ventures, moving from Dakar to Paris, New York, and Tunis and back to Dakar. The French vaccine developed in this project caused dangerous meningoencephalitis in some children and was used to vaccinate more than fourteen million people in the 1940s. This chapter argues that both global networks of laboratory infrastructure and infrastructural absence in West Africa enabled the Pastorians to develop a viable prototype and ignore its adverse consequences. The technopolitics of vaccine testing and the global politics of laboratory networks interacted here to produce experimental success and practical disaster. The chapter concludes with an investigation of the mass campaigns of the late 1930s and early 1940s, deadly incidents of the 1950s, and the vaccine’s discontinuation in the 1960s and 1970s. It highlights the occasional competition and occasional rivalry with the Rockefeller Foundation and the British Empire.