Do Vaccine Mandates on Childcare Services Work?

Here is the latest paper I have published with Ang Li that provides an evaluation of No Jab No Play policies that have been enacted in a series of Australian states. Here is the title and abstract:

Title:

Vaccine mandates on childcare entry without conscientious objection exemptions: A quasi-experimental panel study

Abstract:
Objectives
Examine the effect of No Jab No Play policies, which linked vaccine status to childcare service entry without allowing for personal belief exemptions, on immunisation coverage.
Study design
Immunisation coverage rates from the Australian Immunisation Register were linked to regional level covariates from the Australian Bureau of Statistics between January 2016 and December 2019. Differential timings of policy rollouts across states were used to assess changes in coverage with the implementation of policies with generalised linear models. Quantile regression and subgroup analysis were also conducted to explore the variation in policy responses.
Results
Baseline mean vaccination rates in 2016 were 93.4% for one-year-olds, 91.2% for two-year-olds and 93.2% for five-year-olds. Increases in coverage post-policy were significant but small, at around 1% across age groups, with larger increases in two and five-year-olds. Accounting for aggregate time trends and regional characteristics, implementation of the policies was associated with improved full immunisation coverage rates for age one (post-year 1: 0.15% [95 %CI–0.23; 0.52]; post-year 2: 0.56% [95 %CI 0.05; 1.07]), age two (post-year 1: 0.49 [95 %CI: 0.00; 0.97]; post-year 2: 1.15% [95 %CI: 0.53; 1.77], and age five (post-year 1: 0.38% [95 %CI 0.08; 0.67]; post-year 2: 0.71% [95 %CI 0.25; 1.16]. The policy effect was dispersed and insignificant at the lowest quantiles of the distribution of immunisation coverage, and smaller and insignificant in the highest socioeconomic areas.
Conclusion
Findings suggest that No Jab No Play policies had a small positive impact on immunisation coverage. This policy effect varied according to prior distribution of coverage and socio-economic status. Childcare access equity and unresponsiveness in high socioeconomic areas remain concerns.

Comments

The Japanese Economic Miracle: Creative Destruction and Administrative Guidance.

During a lecture before the Eugenics Society in 1937, British economist John Maynard Keynes stated that “a greater cumulative increment than 1 per cent per annum in the standard of life has seldom proved practicable”. Moreover, Keynes continued, “generally speaking the rate of improvement seems to have been somewhat less then 1 per cent per annum cumulative”. Of course, Keynes was speaking during the great depression, and therefore his remarks may be tainted with a particular pessimism. But they draw into sharp relief the experience of economic growth in post-war Japan: between 1950 and 1973, GDP growth averaged 10%, a rate of sustained growth never before seen .By 1962, the English publication Economist, with poetic flair, dubbed Japan’s recovery an “economic miracle” . This designation caught on and became a general catch phrase for spectacular economic growth. In the case of Japan, a multitude of explanations have arisen for why Japan underwent an ‘economic miracle’. Crucial to...

Ideology and Symbolic power: Between Althusser and Bourdieu.

Western Marxism has often laid considerable stress upon the ideology of modern capitalist societies. This focus upon ideology stems from the failure of proletarian revolution to have either occurred, or establish socialism within Western Europe. The exact nature and function of ideology became paramount in Marxian explanations of the continued stability of Western capitalism after the Great War and Great Depression. Marxian conceptualizations of symbolic domination (under the notion of ideology) remain in the realm of consciousness and intellectual frameworks. Pierre Bourdieu developed a paradigm for understanding symbolic power and domination through his theory of dispositional practices that breaks with the concept of ideology and it basis in the tradition of ‘Kantian intellectualism’. This theoretical model both deepens and broadens the sociological understanding of symbolic power and domination, through the acknowledgment of non-intellectual and bodily elements in the dynamics o...

On the dead and buried: Marx, Structure and Agency.

In The Rebel , Albert Camus locates Karl Marx within a 19th century tradition which attempted to “substitute, everywhere, the relative for the absolute”. For Camus, Marxism represents a revision and re-articulation of Auguste Comte’s evolutionary theory of society. This assessment of Marx characterized his philosophical disposition as an inverted bourgeois positivism. However, Camus’s general interpretation is not without competitors from both Marxists and Non-Marxists alike. There are a myriad of works, which attempt to explain Marx’s social thought and establish his exact position on countless points of controversy. Historical Materialism or the materialist conception of history has been one such point of controversy, especially with regards to the relationship between human agency and social structures implicit within the theory. Within the Marxian tradition itself, two broad perspectives on the structure-agency debate emerged after the suppression of the Budapest uprising in 19...

Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

Search This Blog