Valuing Vaccination: A multi-sited policy valuography

Vaccines are one of the most effective forms of public health intervention, yet vaccine hesitancy is a growing concern worldwide. In seeking to address this policy problem, public health advocates emphasize the value of vaccination, expressing it in medical terms and metrics, such as in the number of lives saved or percentage of the population vaccinated. This narrow, specialist understanding of value has exacerbated already polarized debates by failing to accommodate how different actors value and asses the importance of vaccination for example, its scientific, economic, ethical, social, or personal value. This research project views these practices as inherently political. To account for how vaccination is valued by different actors, the project team will look at five sites relevant to vaccination governance, with Austria as a paradigmatic case: policy programs, primary care, industry, scientific research, and social media. We ask: how do different actors assign value to vaccination and its governance , and how, in turn, do these valuations both reflect and produce particular forms of governance i.e. ways in which vaccination policy is coordinated and shaped by different actor groups ? To address this research question, we use expert interviews, biographical interviews with parents, ethnographic observations, desk research, and content analysis of Twitter data. Besides our scientific contribution to the study of vaccination from a social science perspective, we seek to contribute to politically sustainable immunization strategies both for existing and emerging vaccines (including those targeting SARS-CoV-2).