VaxPol Lab

A/Prof Katie Attwell’s flagship Commonwealth-funded project studied new mandatory vaccination policies for children in Australia, Italy, France and California. It considered agenda setting, design, use of expertise, enforcement, exemptions and the presentation of impacts and results. A/Prof Attwell published a book on California’s vaccination policy with Professor Mark Navin, Oakland University, Michigan, with Oxford University Press in 2023. She is completing a second book on the four comparative cases. Other publications from the project can be viewed in her Research Repository. 

The Coronavax project sought to build dialogue between the community and government to uncover the conditions necessary for high uptake of the vaccine. 

For further information please see below.

The AIM-CP project has enabled near-real time vaccine safety surveillance from community pharmacies across Australia since 2020. Through partnership with key vaccine recording and surveillance platforms, an automated system developed in this project identifies adverse reactions following immunisation with any vaccine administered by pharmacists. These are automatically reported to AusVaxSafety, Australia’s world-leading vaccine safety surveillance program; to local health departments, and to pharmacists to facilitate urgent patient follow up.

Originally developed for influenza and COVID-19 vaccines, the project now collects safety data for a wide range of vaccines administered in pharmacies to people aged 5 years and older.  As more and more people attend pharmacies for routine vaccination, this project remains intrinsic to monitoring the safety of vaccines in Australia. 

This project analyses and compares how jurisdictions around the world have managed rollout of the Nirsevimab immunisation for infants, including how governments designed and delivered communication strategies for the community. Findings from this study will help to guide future RSV immunisation messaging strategies in WA and elsewhere in Australia.

For more information about either project, contact Shevaun Drislane.

MandEval, funded by the Medical Research Future Fund of the Australian Government, and led by Associate Professor Katie Attwell, aims to enhance the health system by evaluating the implementation and removal of COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The project team is collecting and analysing data related to COVID vaccine mandates, and the researchers will collaborate with decision-makers to inform policy decisions for future pandemic planning and routine immunisation programs for both adults and children. Studies are proceeding in Australia, Italy, France, California and the United Kingdom.

This groundbreaking project is the first of its kind, applying multiple research methodologies to assess the impact and experiences of vaccine mandates across different contexts and for various vaccines. The team of global collaborators brings together expertise in policy, communication studies, epidemiology, economics, medicine, law, sociology, psychology, and ethics. Ultimately, MandEval aims to generate knowledge and improve the effectiveness of the health system by providing an evidence-based foundation for decisions regarding the use and removal of mandates.

This project identifies and analyses the barriers to vaccine uptake amongst two-year-olds in Western Australia’s regions (Pilbara, Midwest and Great Southern), homing in on parents’ attitudes and experiences. It then explores how Western Australia Country Health Service (WACHS) works with Communicable Disease Control Directorate (CDCD) and other state and federal government agencies to understand and intervene in sub-optimal vaccine uptake.

The results of this research will inform a set of recommendations for strategies to address access and acceptance barriers preventing families in the regions from vaccinating their toddlers on time. This PhD project is led by Sultan Mahmood and supervised by Associate Professor Katie Attwell, Professor Chris Blyth, Dr Adam Hannah, and Dr Samantha Carlson. 

The research, led by VaxPol Lab PhD candidate Nor Kamila Kamaruzaman, explores the policymaking process for mandatory vaccination in Malaysia.

Malaysia has previously explored vaccine mandates for childhood vaccines. However, childhood immunisation is still not mandatory and remains optional for parents. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 National Immunisation Programme subsequently imposed consequences upon unvaccinated individuals. It is believed that these mandates influenced vaccine uptake, as shown by the vaccination coverage. Therefore, this project endeavours to explore potential policies for mandating childhood vaccination in Malaysia, drawing from the experience of COVID-19 vaccine mandates. 

Dr Michael Deml

Dr Michael Deml holds a PhD in Epidemiology/Public Health (Faculty of Medicine, University of Basel, Switzerland) and a MA in Sociology (University of Geneva, Switzerland). A Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoc. Mobility Fellow, Michael collaborated with the Coronavax team to study coronavirus vaccine rollout in the Australian context and the impacts of the epidemic on routine vaccine uptake and sentiment. His previous research has employed qualitative and mixed methods to study vaccine hesitancy and under-immunisation in Switzerland. As a social scientist, Michael is interested in patient-provider interactions, infectious disease prevention, medicalised prevention, the politics of prevention and health risk governance. 

Adam Hannah

Adam Hannah is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Queensland, where he focuses on comparative politics and public policy. He is primarily interested in the translation of political ideas and expert knowledge into health and social policy. He has particular expertise in international comparative research, including with regard to major bouts of health care and public pension reform in Sweden and the United States, policy responses to health crises such as antimicrobial resistance and COVID-19 vaccinations and distributional inequality across welfare systems. He has published in scholarly journals such as Policy & Politics, Public Administration, Policy Sciences, Policy & Society and The Journal of European Social Policy. 

Jake Harvey

Mr Jake Harvey is an early career professional with four years of experience in mixed-methods social research. He is primarily interested in understanding how the values of policy implementers impact the implementation of mandatory vaccination policies. Currently working as a health policy analyst, Jake also has experience as a researcher within government, non-governmental bodies and in senatorial offices. Jake is currently researching, alongside Associate Professor Katie Attwell, how the values of implementers have affected the implementation of the No Jab, No Play policy enforced by some Australian states. 

Dr Julie Ji

Dr Julie Ji is a Lecturer at the School of Psychology, University of Plymouth, UK. She is an expert on mental imagery-based future thinking and its impact on emotion, judgment and behaviour in the context of depression, anxiety, and self-injury. Bringing insights and methodologies from her cutting-edge research, Dr Ji is working with VaxPolLab to investigate modifiable psychological factors driving vaccine hesitancy and refusal. Dr Ji completed doctoral training at the University of Cambridge in 2017, and worked at UWA as an inaugural Forrest Postdoctoral Fellow between 2018-2022, following postdoctoral training at the University of Virginia, USA.

Mark Christopher Navin

Mark Christopher Navin, PhD, HEC-C, is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Oakland University (Rochester, MI, USA) and Clinical Ethicist at Beaumont Health. He works primarily in clinical ethics and the ethics of public health, and also conducts empirical research about immunisation policies. His monograph Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Ethics, Epistemology and Health Care was published by Routledge in 2016. His articles have appeared in journals including JAMA Pediatrics, Milbank Quarterly, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Pediatrics, Vaccine, American Journal of Bioethics, Hastings Center Report, and Journal of Medical Ethics. Along with Katie Attwell, he is author of America's Vaccine Wars: California and the Politics of Mandates (Oxford University Press 2023).

Maxine Chau

Maxine Chau is a second-year Doctor of Medicine student at the University of Notre Dame, Fremantle. Her interests include paediatrics, and vaccine social science research. She completed a qualitative, co-design study at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Melbourne as part of her Honours project. The study, recently published in Vaccine, explored the experiences of migrant parents with navigating catch-up vaccination for their children and co-designed some interventions to improve the process.

Professor Lisa Wood

Dr Lisa Wood is a tireless advocate for research being relevant and useful to the real world, with a breadth of research focusing on reducing health inequalities, across areas of homelessness, family and domestic violence and mental health. Lisa leads an expansive program of collaborative homelessness research, strongly anchored around priorities identified by services working at the coalface of homelessness and people with a lived experience. Tackling barriers to preventive healthcare is a high priority, and together with Homeless Healthcare, she has led since 2019 the implementation and evaluation of targeted influenza vaccination clinics for people experiencing homelessness.

Since the onset of COVID-19, Lisa has worked closely with the health and homelessness sectors in WA and nationally to amplify the need for people experiencing homelessness to be recognised as high priority population group because they cannot ‘stay home’ and have a high prevalence of risk factors for COVID mortality. Through the Coronavax 3 project, Lisa is contributing to ensuring that the barriers and enablers to COVID vaccination for vulnerable populations groups are heard.