We analyze the process of Covid-19 pediatric vaccine authorization for children under five in the United States as a complex case for inclusive public discourse best conceptualized through collective action theory.
The process for authorizing, recommending, and distributing Covid-19 vaccines to the youngest children mostly mirrored that of the process for adult and adolescent vaccinations. Departures from adult precedents help identify the ways in which multiple, uncoordinated, or loosely coordinated, actors contributed collectively without clear attribution of singular or coherent responsibility. Importantly, on our analysis, this departure from precedent reflects contradictory and controversial public, media, and agency messaging about vaccines for young children. The ways in which expert agencies were responsive to some, while failing to respond to other, public concerns and deliberation confounded the process of pediatric vaccine authorization, as well as its subsequent uptake.
We present a bioethical analysis of this tumultuous process of authorization, roll-out, and uptake of pediatric Covid-19 vaccines conceptualizing it as a process sensitive to inclusive public discourse yielding a unique kind of collective action problem. Framing this process as a problem of collective action helps to identify how philosophical bioethics can facilitate the creation of spaces for interaction and deliberation among a diverse set of public, agency, and scientific interests related to pediatric vaccines.
The case of pediatric Covid-19 vaccines presents unique complexities of coordinated action extending beyond many of the literature’s touchstone cases, showing how bioethics is not only an application of collective action theory, but can further collective action theory.
Ami Harbin – Philosophy Department – Oakland University