A Mother’s Ignorance: Gender, Trust, and Law in Vaccination

Vaccination has been one of the most successful public health interventions globally, but it relies on sustained high uptake by the community to achieve its goals. This talk examines how law has been used to improve vaccination rates over the last two hundred years, and how debates around vaccination intersect with social expectations of gender and expertise to reveal the central role of public trust in effective vaccination laws.

Dr Rebekah McWhirter is Senior Lecturer in Law at the Australian National University. Her research examines legal and ethical aspects of health, and aims to identify how law can support health. Her work is interdisciplinary, and has a particular focus on research ethics governance and trustworthy governance of genomic data. She is a director of Women’s Health Tasmania and the Australasian Association of Bioethics and Health Law, and co-chair of the Education, Ethics and Social Issues Committee of the Human Genetics Society of Australasia.