Vaccination policy is a historical cornerstone of public health. Yet recent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles in Europe have led to a renewed concern with vaccination policy and an awareness of its political nature. These emerging debates often draw on dichotomous categories such as favoring or opposing a particular vaccine, and rely on vaccination coverage as the sole indicator of the effectiveness of a given vaccination program. In this talk, I will argue that these two features of contemporary vaccination policy have created a political and discursive deadlock for public health practitioners.
This talk will first unfold the complex configurations between state, society, and science on which effective public health policy rests, pointing to the multiplicity of actors, sites, and artefacts involved in any given national immunization program. Second, I will particularly highlight the role of infrastructures in enabling particular forms of knowing and governing. In doing so, I will specifically highlight the role and shape of vaccination registries as calculative infrastructures in which vaccination rates are calculated and assembled, pointing to different modes of knowing that become in/visible in this process of quantification. Finally, this material will form a basis for a set of critical reflections on contemporary vaccination policy discourse in which I call for a more nuanced approach to addressing the challenge of vaccine hesitancy.