Pandemic Preparedness: Why the Humanities and Social Sciences Matter
A recently published article in Frontiers in Public Health outlines the importance of insights from the humanities and social sciences for developing and maintaining preparedness for future pandemics. Here, Sally Frampton explains how this interdisciplinary and collaborative research publication came about.
Read the published article here.
Our Frontiers article has its roots in workshop that took place in December 2022 at the University of Oxford as part of Infecting Minds: The Past, Present and Future of Vaccine Hesitancy in South Africa, which was a John Fell Fund/Wellcome ISSF funded project with additional funding from the Crick Institute in London. The purpose of the workshop was to see how the concept of vaccine hesitancy might be problematised or re-shaped through multidisciplinary discussion. The workshop brought together voices from history, theology, social sciences, clinical medicine, art, and science communication. Vaccine hesitancy was listed as one of the World Health Organisation’s top ten threats to global health in 2019 and vaccine hesitancy is fundamental to several domains, including stopping infectious diseases and preparing for epidemics. While pandemic preparedness often focuses on epidemiological, clinical, laboratory and public health approaches and resources, we wanted to set out an urgent case of need to improve confidence in vaccine programmes through interdisciplinary activity, integrating social science, history, theology, ethics, policy, and public engagement. Exploring the roots of vaccine hesitancy over time in communities occupying different geographical and cultural spaces provides opportunities to understand why vaccines are accepted or rejected within certain locales and networks. Approaches must account for political and policy influences, and the role of conflict and crisis. Special attention is needed to understand narratives within certain specific settings, for example, faith communities, healthcare workers, and vulnerable populations including those under-served by conventional models of healthcare.
In this collective piece, we divided into small groups to work on individual sections of the paper trying to be attentive to ensuring equal weight to different perspectives. As well as providing a conceptual overview, we used our own qualitative research (led by Kingsley) to evidence the necessity of this approach, highlighting for example the role religious persuasion had in influencing some of our cohort’s perspective on taking vaccines, as well as the significance of age demographic.
Medical Humanities Hub, TORCH Research Hubs
