Vaccination ethics

One does not have to look too far within the popular media, and increasingly within medical journals, to find stories related to vaccines and vaccination that have ethical issues as a central component. Stories about parents refusing to vaccinate their children [1,2], the controversy involving the false linking of MMR vaccination to autism [3,4] or proposals to have mandatory vaccination for health care workers [5,6] demonstrate the different individual-level and population-level ethical issues raised by vaccination. These stories, however, represent only a mere fraction of the important and interesting ethical issues raised by vaccination. Nevertheless, they provide a valuable opportunity to examine the goals of vaccination – and how these goals may share or come into conflict with other goals. It is an opportunity to compare the goals of vaccination with the goals of medicine and of public health, as such goals raise fundamental moral issues and will shape the way in which we go about seeking to justify the use of vaccines in particular contexts