Should Teachers Promote Vaccination?

The Covid19 pandemic brought the importance of vaccination and public attitudes towards it firmly to the fore. However, vaccine hesitancy and refusal remain significant barriers to global uptake, with post-pandemic declines in routine immunization contributing to disease outbreaks worldwide.

Research shows that education plays a vital role in vaccination acceptance. But, while vaccine hesitancy is higher in those with lower education levels, in affluent countries, vaccine refusal is more prevalent among the highly educated. This suggests it may stem from epistemic vice rather than mere ignorance. Furthermore, not all concerns about vaccination are due to wrongheaded scientific beliefs. Some involve moral or religious claims about which seemingly reasonable people disagree. Given these complexities, should teachers promote vaccination? If so, should this extend beyond scientifically evidenced propositions to include the moral and civic virtues of immunization?

Drawing on recent philosophical work on teaching controversial issues, Ruth Wareham argues that teachers are warranted in promoting both the scientific case for vaccine safety and efficacy and the moral case for vaccination qua civic duty. Indeed, she maintains that the case for teaching vaccination directively is particularly defensible since robust arguments can be made for it using either of the two most plausible positions on delineating and teaching controversial issues – namely, the epistemic criterion and the political criterion – as well as a pluralist approach that seeks to combine them.