Maria Alejandra Petino Zappala

Vaccine hesitancy is a major threat to public health worldwide. Debates about vaccines are often moralized; however, how ethics and ethical judgments relate to vaccination intention remains underexplored. Here, we identify ethically relevant concerns from the academic literature that we operationalize for a pre-registered survey to study how ethical judgments relate to parents’ intentions to vaccinate their children against HPV. We also investigate potential sociocultural influences on ethical judgments: we compare parents from the US, the UK, and Germany. We find that parents’ ethical judgments in all countries are strongly associated with vaccination intention. We also find cross-cultural differences in how their trust in science, physicians, and institutions relates to perceived sociomoral pressure. Still, in the three countries trust moderates the negative correlation between perceived health risks and vaccination intention. These results suggest that campaigns highlighting ethical aspects of vaccination and targeting relevant moral concerns could be effective against hesitancy.

En este trabajo, en base a análisis realizados en población adulta argentina que vinculan patrones de salud a nivel poblacional con una hipótesis de la biología evolutiva, buscamos poner en evidencia las limitaciones y problematizar algunos de los supuestos y enfoques de la epidemiología “clásica” para explicar condiciones complejas no transmisibles como, en este caso, la diabetes tipo 2. Asimismo, a través de este análisis cuestionamos la adopción acrítica y descontextualizada de criterios diagnósticos y categorías desarrolladas de acuerdo a intereses particulares e impuestas través de relaciones desiguales de poder.

Setting standards for budding interdisciplinary fields is a crucial step in the acquisition of their identity and in making possible their coalescence and institutionalization. However, negotiating which of the epistemic standards of the original disciplines will be retained for the new field is not trivial. This paper explores how a bias towards the standards from one (now dominant) discipline can result in dynamics of gatekeeping against ideas and theories from other, now subordinate, ones. The emergent relationships of power can result in different varieties of exclusion or selective incorporation of ideas. More importantly, this can also bring about the loss of the identity and genuine contributions of subordinate disciplines within the new field. I illustrate this with the historical case of paleontology and its role within evolutionary biology after the establishment of the Modern Synthesis. I argue that a bias toward the standards of population genetics left paleontology in a subordinate position, ultimately leading to the dissatisfaction of paleontologists and their vocal rejection of the standards in place. To evidence this, I turn to the case of the Turkana Lake mollusks presented in 1981 as evidence for the theory of punctuated equilibria. The different standards in play at the time collided in the interpretation of these fossil sequences, reflecting broader trends in the reception of the theory itself. Inspecting the standards set for interdisciplinary fields as related to relations of power, I argue, can help not only understand problems faced by past synthetic efforts, but inform current and future attempts.