In this episode, Associate Professor Katie Attwell talks with students from the UC Riverside School of Public Policy about vaccine hesitancy, mandates, and public health policy.  

About Katie Attwell:

Associate Professor Katie Attwell is a political science and public policy scholar at the University of Western Australia, where she leads VaxPolLab. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Wesfarmers Centre of Vaccines and Infectious Diseases at Telethon Kids Institute, Perth and is the Chair of the Collaboration on Social Science and Immunisation (COSSI), Australia’s national network of vaccination social science researchers. A/Prof Attwell is a global expert in vaccine hesitancy and vaccination policies for childhood and COVID-19 vaccines. Her recent Discovery Early Career Researcher Award fellowship (DECRA 2019-2022) funded by the Australian Research Council explored mandatory childhood vaccination policies in Australia, Italy, France, and California. Arising from this project is her book, co-authored with Mark Navin, entitled America’s New Vaccine Wars: California and the Politics of Mandates (OUP, 2023). Associate Professor Attwell led the interdisciplinary West Australian project “Coronavax: Preparing Community and Government”, which engaged in community and government research for the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out, funded by Wesfarmers and the Health Department of Western Australia. From 2023, Associate Professor Attwell leads MandEval, a mixed methods and multi-country study of the implementation and impact of COVID-19 vaccine mandates in Australia, Italy, France and California, a $4.7 million dollar project funded by the Medical Research Future Fund of the Australian Government. 

Learn more about Katie Attwell via https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/persons/katie-attwell 

Podcast Highlights:  

“How we navigate [vaccine policies is] always contextual and  informed by the political community that we're talking about. What you might get away with in California, you would not get away with in a red state and what you get away with in Australia, you might not get away with in California. You have to look at the people, you have to look at the political ideology, the history.”

-       Katie Attwell on the importance of understanding the context in which a policy is being implemented. 

“The activists and the technical experts and civil society actors and elected officials who changed California's vaccination policy, they were so successful in mobilizing a discourse that gets you thinking about vulnerable people.”

-       Katie Attwell on the success of California policy actors in informing the public about the risks of nonvaccination on vulnerable populations. “It's crucial that you understand [policy] receptiveness, not just because the policy might backfire, but because if you bring in a policy that you can't then implement and enforce, you're actually bringing people's attention to government's weaknesses and that could be potentially quite damaging as well.” 

-       Katie Attwell on why it is crucial to ensure policy survives implementation.  

Guest:

Katie Attwell (Associate Professor, University of Western Australia) 

Interviewers:

Rachel Strausman (UCR Public Policy Major, Dean’s Vice Chief Ambassador)

Andrew Shannon (UCR Public Policy Major, Dean’s Ambassador) 

Music by: C Codaine
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Xylo-Ziko/Minimal_1625

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Xylo-Ziko/Phase

Commercial Links:
https://spp.ucr.edu/ba-mpphttps://spp.ucr.edu/mpp 

This is a production of the UCR School of Public Policy: https://spp.ucr.edu/ 

Subscribe to this podcast so you don’t miss an episode.

Learn more about the series and other episodes via https://spp.ucr.edu/podcast.