COVID CRISIS LAB-CERGAS Seminar - Katie Attwell

Link zoom

https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/j/97201554635

COVID CRISIS LAB-CERGAS Seminar

Katie Attwell, “CHOICE AND CONSEQUENCE: New Mandatory Childhood Vaccination Policies in America, Australia, and Europe” 

ABSTRACT

In the last decade, California, Australia, Italy, and France were the first jurisdictions to impose consequences on parents who were not vaccinating their children. Governments and commentators frequently depicted this as a necessary responses to public health crises. However, governments choose coercive vaccine mandates from multiple strategies available and analyses of these first four jurisdictions reveals inherent failures within prior approaches. All four cases relied upon “incomplete modulation” to ensure vaccination occurred, using pre-existing vaccine mandates developed for different purposes. By the present century, these did not cover all vaccines, were poorly enforced, or selectively exempted refusers by design via personal belief exemptions. The lack of sufficient vaccination discipline to maintain universally high vaccination coverage generated political and technical demands (Italy and France) or public demands (Australia and California) to institute “complete” modulation. Institutions, elected officials, policy entrepreneurs, and/or publics pushed to expand coercion to cover more vaccines, more settings, and more policy targets. The resultant new mandatory policies respond to the shortcomings of the previous modes of governance but do not correct them. Instead, prior deficits in state capacity and action – failures to instill “vaccine discipline” in populations – infuse the new mandatory vaccination policies. Prior deficits drive how governments formulate the role and function of their new policies within the contemporary regulatory state. They also shape how policymakers navigate emergent governance demands and opportunities, using additional forms of coercion upon new policy actors. Finally, prior deficits inform public statements and private reservations about whether governments can ever remove the measures that – in continental Europe – they promise are temporary. Likewise, exemption policies that “undid themselves” (Australia and California) would be unlikely to re-emerge following the reframing of vaccine refusal as social deviance. 

SHORT BIO

Associate Professor Katie Attwell is a political science and public policy scholar at the University of Western Australia, and a global expert in vaccine hesitancy and vaccination policies for childhood and COVID-19 vaccines. Katie has engaged in community, policy, and behavioural research in vaccination uptake since 2014, the year of her ground-breaking and internationally recognised “I Immunise” campaign, which drew on behavioural insights to address alternative lifestyle-based vaccine hesitancy in Fremantle, Western Australia. Katie led the interdisciplinary West Australian project “Coronavax: Preparing Community and Government”, which engaged in community and government research for a vaccine roll-out for COVID-19. She currently leads “MandEval: Mandate Evaluation” exploring COVID-19 vaccine mandates and their impact in Australia, Italy, France, California and the United Kingdom. MandEval is funded by the Medical Research Future Fund of the Australian Government ($4.7 million). A/Prof Attwell frequently shares her research and insights globally with the academic field, governments, technical specialists, and the media. She has published in Nature, Pediatrics, Milbank Quarterly, and Social Science and Medicine. With her team, she researches vaccination policymaking in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Malaysia. 

For further information on the talk, please contact covidcrisislab@unibocconi.it