Amphithéâtre Maurice Halbwachs, Site Marcelin Berthelot
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Abstract

Because they affect the whole population, vaccination policies are a privileged place to observe contemporary health inequalities. In this presentation, we will return to the social mechanisms explaining these inequalities, but we will also look at the paradoxes revealed by the study of vaccination today. Indeed, the increasing number and politicization of debates on vaccination complicates the relationship usually observed between social resources and the adoption of good health practices. Non-vaccination may reflect a lack of resources limiting access to the healthcare system, but also its opposite: the ability to find competing sources of information and the confidence to question medical authority. Vaccination also highlights the complexity of healthcare decision-making processes, and in particular the gap that can exist between what people think and what they do, as well as the prevalence of indecision in these processes. Using questionnaire surveys on a wide range of vaccines, and looking back at ethnographies of vaccine resistance, we propose to explore the ways in which social inequalities influence healthcare decision-making processes in a context where medical knowledge is contested.

Jeremy Ward

Jeremy Ward

Jeremy Ward is a sociologist and research fellow at Inserm (Cermes3, Villejuif). Since 2020, he has been an expert member of the Technical Commission on Vaccinations at the French National Authority for Health. Since 2023, he has coordinated the SHS-Vaccination-France network with Patrick Peretti-Watel and Pierre Verger. His work deals with the emergence of public debates and ordinary relations to science on medical issues. His approach lies at the intersection of political sociology, the sociology of science and the sociology of cognition and representations. He has worked mainly on vaccination in France, and on a variety of other subjects such as the prescription of hydroxychloroquine, or ordinary relations to clinical trials and conflicts of interest.

Speaker(s)

Jeremy Ward

Research Fellow, Inserm

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