Dr Rebekah McWhirter1
1Deakin University, Geelong, Australia
To optimise public health benefits, vaccination needs to be taken up by a very high proportion of the population. When this cannot be achieved through voluntary means, mandatory policies based on incentives or penalties may be used to improve vaccination coverage. In determining whether a particular policy is justified, the rights and interests of individuals need to be balanced with the rights and interests of communities. Public health ethicists have proposed frameworks and principles for evaluating when a policy achieves an acceptable balance. Law might be expected to play a role in protecting people from overly restrictive vaccination policies by employing these principles in various types of legal scrutiny.
To assess the extent to which law actually performs this role, this presentation analyses three types of legal scrutiny of vaccination policy: human rights compatibility assessments, legal challenges under employment law, and legal challenges under international human rights law. I argue that the law provides little protection from overly restrictive public health policies because of barriers to engaging with empirical evidence, compounded by challenges in accounting for the way risk-benefit ratios may change over time. This suggests a potential role for legal epidemiology in the scrutiny of public health laws.
Biography:
Rebekah is a Senior Lecturer in Health Law and Ethics in the School of Medicine at Deakin University. She is particularly interested in using empirical research methods to determine how law can best be used to create conditions conducive to health.