Vaccination Policy and Public Trust

By Kelsey Berry

The conflict between a physician’s dual roles as an agent of population health and an agent of his or her patient is exemplified in the classical debate about ethical vaccination policy. Whereas studies have demonstrated the role of vaccination in protecting public health at negligible risk to individuals, “vaccine hesitancy” and non-acceptance among parents has increasingly contributed to vaccination delay and refusal. Recent domestic measles outbreaks and increased numbers of reported infections in 2011 and 2013 gesture to the public health impacts of even small decrements in uptake, especially in a globalized setting where the infection can travel easily.[1]

The FORUM at Harvard School of Public Health recently hosted an event on vaccination, exploring through an expert panel the drivers of public perception about vaccination and ways of restoring public trust in vaccination. Panelists discussed the need for research into the values and concerns of those who exhibit vaccine hesitancy, and development of effective modes of communication, tailored to individuals’ concerns, that will allow trained physicians to effectively guide choice. Notably, the clinical encounter was brought up several times as fertile ground for both reestablishing trust and promoting vaccine uptake effectively.

Reestablishing public trust in public health interventions may be key to avoiding conflicts between physicians’ duties to both population health and patients/guardians. If the patient/guardian ultimately expresses support for vaccination, as a result of persuasive information supplied by the physician, the conflict seems to disappear. However, what about the case in which a patient expresses support for vaccination as a policy, but does not support the use of vaccination in the case of his or her own child (assuming for simplicity that there are no medical contraindications to vaccination in this child’s case)? This scenario brings out a possible duality in the held views of patient/guardians. There seem to be two competing views within one patient/guardian: first, the view that we as a society should promote population health through vaccination, and second the view that one’s own person/child should be exempt from vaccination. Read More

Is “My Patient’s Agent” Always Justified?

Kelsey Berry

Is a physician always justified in acting as his or her patient’s agent?

This question is familiar to clinical and population-level bioethicists alike, though I hesitate to say that it is age-old. There are a variety of ways to approach a response to this question, as evidenced by extensive treatment of this topic in the philosophical and bioethics literature (which I will not survey here). One popular approach involves raising candidate circumstances that may justify deviations from the principal-agent relationship that obtains between physicians and patients* – for instance, ethicists might consider whether a physician is justified in deviating from acting as his or her patient’s agent under circumstances in which (a) the action that is in the best interest of the patient conflicts with the action that in the best interest of the population health, (b) the action that is in the best interests of the patient requires inefficient use of community resources on some criteria, or (c) what the patient perceives to be in his or her best interests conflicts with what the physician recommends, etc. This list is woefully inexhaustive, but it highlights a theme in this thread of argumentation. In each scenario, we’re invited to accept the initial assumption that the physician is justified, if not all of the time, at least most of the time, in acting as his or her patient’s agent. Then we are led to consider whether the candidate circumstances raised qualify as an exception to this rule.

The often-unarticulated premise, that the physician is typically justified in acting as his or her patient’s agent, is not without philosophical support from several prominent theories. We also have pragmatic reasons to begin with this premise, for there are few specific actors (to whom we can easily point) that compete with the patient for a principal-agent relationship of the type that obtains between a physician and his or her patient. Of course, other patients under care are obvious contenders, as are other potential patients. Though adjudicating between a physician’s obligations to both existing and potential patients raises interesting issues, the conflicts these principal-agent relationships give rise to still trade on the basic assumption that the physician has reason to maintain the basic fiduciary relationship in most circumstances. Read More