Vanderslott
Biographic Data
| ID | 48413 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Vanderslott |
| FAMILY NAME | Vanderslott |
| SIGNATURE | VANDERSLOTT |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8685-7758 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 109 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
What is unhealthy about public health? Vaccination, evidence and the politics of uncertainty
Recent developments in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union suggest that public health is undergoing a crisis that is both infrastructural and epistemic. Taking the 2026 revision of US childhood vaccination recommendations as a focal case, this commentary examines how vaccination has become a privileged terrain for the political weaponisation of scientific uncertainty. We argue that the wider pressures on public health inf…
Effective altruism, technoscience and the making of philanthropic value
A recent philanthropic movement with advocates among high-profile tech entrepreneurs and philosophers, effective altruism (EA) has been widely disparaged for its flawed moral philosophy and conservative political implications. As philanthropic practice, however, it has been seldom studied. In this paper, we argue that claims to technoscientific expertise are central to how EA actors understand, legitimize, and take part in the production of phila…
Pandemic preparedness
Whilst many lessons were learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing reflection is needed to develop and maintain preparedness for future outbreaks. Within the field of infectious disease and public health there remain silos and hierarchies in interdisciplinary work, with the risk that humanities and social sciences remain on the epistemological peripheries. However, these disciplines offer insights, expertise and tools that contribute to underst…
Examining the role of community champions to promote vaccine uptake in under-served communities in the United Kingdom
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how ethnic minority groups are disproportionally affected by health crises and the potential for community engagement to provide equitable public health information and services. Policymakers, practitioners, and academics have presented community engagement as a way to improve the access and uptake of health services, including vaccination, but the role of community members for health promotion is rarely ques…
‘Worm Wars’
What counts as evidence in global health? What happens when evidence is contested? This article concentrates on the ‘Worm Wars’, a public academic debate in 2015 on the effectiveness of health interventions to treat populations with parasitic worms, to assess how health interventions are appraised by different disciplinary perspectives. I discuss what happens when a success story about randomised control trials (or RCTs) – often hailed as the ‘go…
Political and Community Logics of Emergent Disease Vaccine Deployment
With a growing number of emerging infectious diseases and the rapid development of vaccines during epidemics and pandemics, public health officials at the global and national level have reported concerns about vaccine hesitancy, often attributing this to a problem of misinformation and poor understanding of risk. However, social scientists have found that vaccination perceptions are complex and multi-faceted. By focusing on the historical, cultur…
Co-producing Human and Animal Experimental Subjects
Preclinical (animal) testing and human testing of drugs and vaccines are rarely considered by social scientists side by side. Where this is done, it is typically for theoretically exploring the ethics of the two situations to compare relative treatment. In contrast, we empirically explore how human clinical trial participants understand the role of animal test subjects in vaccine development. Furthermore, social science research has only concentr…
Online on the frontline
This paper explores vaccine hesitancy among healthcare workers (HCWs) in the UK, where different COVID-19 vaccines were being rolled out through a national vaccination campaign from 2020 to 2022, consisting of a first and second dose programme. Through a mixed-method approach using qualitative discourse analysis and network analysis of Twitter data, we assessed HCW perceptions and views about the administration and delivery of COVID-19 vaccines i…
Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy in the UK
Background Our aim was to estimate provisional willingness to receive a coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine, identify predictive socio-demographic factors, and, principally, determine potential causes in order to guide information provision. Methods A non-probability online survey was conducted (24th September−17th October 2020) with 5,114 UK adults, quota sampled to match the population for age, gender, ethnicity, income, and region. The Oxford …
Between paternalism and illegality
Manual scavengers, or ‘Safai Karamcharis’, as they are known in India, are sanitation workers who manually clean human waste for a living and face considerable occupational health risks. They are subject to deep-seated, caste-based stigma associated with their perceived ‘caste impurity’ and lack of cleanliness, which result both in consistently dangerous substandard working conditions and lack of social mobility, with women facing greater hardshi…
Institutionalised ignorance in policy and regulation
Attributing public ignorance in vaccination narratives
The notion of an 'ignorant public' is attributed in outbreak scenarios through vaccination narratives that are institutionally reinforced by governments and the media across different contexts. The ignorant public narrative is a discursive shift that reduces public concerns about vaccines to a lack of knowledge, obscuring how these concerns are indicative of mistrust and anxiety or efforts to counter the dominance of acceptable and legitimate kno…
Methodological and Ethical Considerations when Conducting Qualitative Interview Research With Healthcare Professionals
The impacts of healthcare professionals (HCPs) being research participants are often neglected. As professionals, they tend to be perceived as 'immune' to many negative effects of sharing their experiences. However, in the context of an ongoing global pandemic such as COVID-19, these assumptions can be clearly challenged. This article draws on researchers' experiences of conducting single and longitudinal qualitative interviews with HCPs during t…
Vaccine nationalism and internationalism
BACKGROUND: Vaccine nationalism has become a key topic of discussion during the development, testing, and rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. Media attention has highlighted the ways that global, coordinated access to vaccines has been limited during the pandemic. It has also exposed how some countries have secured vaccine supply, through bilateral purchase agreements and the way pharmaceutical companies have priced, negotiated, and delivered these sup…
Online Social Endorsement and Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in the United Kingdom
We explore the implications of online social endorsement for the Covid-19 vaccination program in the United Kingdom. Vaccine hesitancy is a long-standing problem, but it has assumed great urgency due to the pandemic. By early 2021, the United Kingdom had the world's highest Covid-19 mortality per million of population. Our survey of a nationally representative sample of UK adults ( N = 5,114) measured socio-demographics, social and political atti…
Re-ordering connections
This paper examines the impact of disruptions to the organisation and delivery of healthcare services and efforts to re-order care through emotion management during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. Framing care as an affective practice, studying healthcare workers' (HCWs) experiences enables better understanding of how interactions between staff, patients and families changed as a result of the pandemic. Using a rapid qualitative research methodo…
Travel restrictions as a disease control measure
Travel restrictions have become a common disease control measure during the 2019 Coronavirus disease pandemic (COVID-19). Measures have ranged from quarantines when entering a country to outright travel bans. Yet more widespread travel restrictions in the form of country vaccine entry requirements have been in place for a long time for another disease - yellow fever. We track the historical underpinnings and policy developments that have led to s…
Neglected Tropical Diseases
Neglected tropical diseases show how a disease group can be formed to compete in the global health policy marketplace. The naming and branding of a new disease category is used to organize activities, direct attention and resources, and rationalize the governance of diseases. The politics of classification involves processes of negotiation and conceptual development by key actors. Here, discussions about central characteristics, naming, and inclu…
Carrying Out Rapid Qualitative Research During a Pandemic
Social scientists have a robust history of contributing to better understandings of and responses to disease outbreaks. The implementation of qualitative research in the context of infectious epidemics, however, continues to lag behind in the delivery, credibility, and timeliness of findings when compared with other research designs. The purpose of this article is to reflect on our experience of carrying out three research studies (a rapid apprai…
Exploring the meaning of pro-vaccine activism across two countries
Moving From Outsider to Insider Status Through Metrics
Neglected Tropical Diseases” (NTDs) are lesser-known diseases, existing in the poorest communities in the shadow of the high-profile and well-funded “Big Three” (HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria). Blame for neglect is pointed towards protagonists, which include pharmaceutical companies, for not investing in diseases of poverty and donor governments and NGOs, for directing attention to high mortality diseases. Yet, other sites of neglect tend to…
Carrying Out Rapid Qualitative Research During a Pandemic
Social scientists have a robust history of contributing to better understandings of and responses to disease outbreaks. The implementation of qualitative research in the context of infectious epidemics, however, continues to lag behind in the delivery, credibility, and timeliness of findings when compared with other research designs. The purpose of this article is to reflect on our experience of carrying out three research studies (a rapid apprai…
Online Social Endorsement and Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in the United Kingdom
We explore the implications of online social endorsement for the Covid-19 vaccination program in the United Kingdom. Vaccine hesitancy is a long-standing problem, but it has assumed great urgency due to the pandemic. By early 2021, the United Kingdom had the world's highest Covid-19 mortality per million of population. Our survey of a nationally representative sample of UK adults ( N = 5,114) measured socio-demographics, social and political atti…
Exploring the meaning of pro-vaccine activism across two countries
Attributing public ignorance in vaccination narratives
The notion of an 'ignorant public' is attributed in outbreak scenarios through vaccination narratives that are institutionally reinforced by governments and the media across different contexts. The ignorant public narrative is a discursive shift that reduces public concerns about vaccines to a lack of knowledge, obscuring how these concerns are indicative of mistrust and anxiety or efforts to counter the dominance of acceptable and legitimate kno…
Re-ordering connections
This paper examines the impact of disruptions to the organisation and delivery of healthcare services and efforts to re-order care through emotion management during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. Framing care as an affective practice, studying healthcare workers' (HCWs) experiences enables better understanding of how interactions between staff, patients and families changed as a result of the pandemic. Using a rapid qualitative research methodo…
Methodological and Ethical Considerations when Conducting Qualitative Interview Research With Healthcare Professionals
The impacts of healthcare professionals (HCPs) being research participants are often neglected. As professionals, they tend to be perceived as 'immune' to many negative effects of sharing their experiences. However, in the context of an ongoing global pandemic such as COVID-19, these assumptions can be clearly challenged. This article draws on researchers' experiences of conducting single and longitudinal qualitative interviews with HCPs during t…
Online on the frontline
This paper explores vaccine hesitancy among healthcare workers (HCWs) in the UK, where different COVID-19 vaccines were being rolled out through a national vaccination campaign from 2020 to 2022, consisting of a first and second dose programme. Through a mixed-method approach using qualitative discourse analysis and network analysis of Twitter data, we assessed HCW perceptions and views about the administration and delivery of COVID-19 vaccines i…
Institutionalised ignorance in policy and regulation
Moving From Outsider to Insider Status Through Metrics
Neglected Tropical Diseases” (NTDs) are lesser-known diseases, existing in the poorest communities in the shadow of the high-profile and well-funded “Big Three” (HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria). Blame for neglect is pointed towards protagonists, which include pharmaceutical companies, for not investing in diseases of poverty and donor governments and NGOs, for directing attention to high mortality diseases. Yet, other sites of neglect tend to…
Effective altruism, technoscience and the making of philanthropic value
A recent philanthropic movement with advocates among high-profile tech entrepreneurs and philosophers, effective altruism (EA) has been widely disparaged for its flawed moral philosophy and conservative political implications. As philanthropic practice, however, it has been seldom studied. In this paper, we argue that claims to technoscientific expertise are central to how EA actors understand, legitimize, and take part in the production of phila…
Co-producing Human and Animal Experimental Subjects
Preclinical (animal) testing and human testing of drugs and vaccines are rarely considered by social scientists side by side. Where this is done, it is typically for theoretically exploring the ethics of the two situations to compare relative treatment. In contrast, we empirically explore how human clinical trial participants understand the role of animal test subjects in vaccine development. Furthermore, social science research has only concentr…
Exploring the meaning of pro-vaccine activism across two countries
Moving From Outsider to Insider Status Through Metrics
Neglected Tropical Diseases” (NTDs) are lesser-known diseases, existing in the poorest communities in the shadow of the high-profile and well-funded “Big Three” (HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria). Blame for neglect is pointed towards protagonists, which include pharmaceutical companies, for not investing in diseases of poverty and donor governments and NGOs, for directing attention to high mortality diseases. Yet, other sites of neglect tend to…
Travel restrictions as a disease control measure
Travel restrictions have become a common disease control measure during the 2019 Coronavirus disease pandemic (COVID-19). Measures have ranged from quarantines when entering a country to outright travel bans. Yet more widespread travel restrictions in the form of country vaccine entry requirements have been in place for a long time for another disease - yellow fever. We track the historical underpinnings and policy developments that have led to s…
Neglected Tropical Diseases
Neglected tropical diseases show how a disease group can be formed to compete in the global health policy marketplace. The naming and branding of a new disease category is used to organize activities, direct attention and resources, and rationalize the governance of diseases. The politics of classification involves processes of negotiation and conceptual development by key actors. Here, discussions about central characteristics, naming, and inclu…
Carrying Out Rapid Qualitative Research During a Pandemic
Social scientists have a robust history of contributing to better understandings of and responses to disease outbreaks. The implementation of qualitative research in the context of infectious epidemics, however, continues to lag behind in the delivery, credibility, and timeliness of findings when compared with other research designs. The purpose of this article is to reflect on our experience of carrying out three research studies (a rapid apprai…
Vaccine nationalism and internationalism
BACKGROUND: Vaccine nationalism has become a key topic of discussion during the development, testing, and rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. Media attention has highlighted the ways that global, coordinated access to vaccines has been limited during the pandemic. It has also exposed how some countries have secured vaccine supply, through bilateral purchase agreements and the way pharmaceutical companies have priced, negotiated, and delivered these sup…
Online Social Endorsement and Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in the United Kingdom
We explore the implications of online social endorsement for the Covid-19 vaccination program in the United Kingdom. Vaccine hesitancy is a long-standing problem, but it has assumed great urgency due to the pandemic. By early 2021, the United Kingdom had the world's highest Covid-19 mortality per million of population. Our survey of a nationally representative sample of UK adults ( N = 5,114) measured socio-demographics, social and political atti…
Re-ordering connections
This paper examines the impact of disruptions to the organisation and delivery of healthcare services and efforts to re-order care through emotion management during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. Framing care as an affective practice, studying healthcare workers' (HCWs) experiences enables better understanding of how interactions between staff, patients and families changed as a result of the pandemic. Using a rapid qualitative research methodo…
Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy in the UK
Background Our aim was to estimate provisional willingness to receive a coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine, identify predictive socio-demographic factors, and, principally, determine potential causes in order to guide information provision. Methods A non-probability online survey was conducted (24th September−17th October 2020) with 5,114 UK adults, quota sampled to match the population for age, gender, ethnicity, income, and region. The Oxford …
Between paternalism and illegality
Manual scavengers, or ‘Safai Karamcharis’, as they are known in India, are sanitation workers who manually clean human waste for a living and face considerable occupational health risks. They are subject to deep-seated, caste-based stigma associated with their perceived ‘caste impurity’ and lack of cleanliness, which result both in consistently dangerous substandard working conditions and lack of social mobility, with women facing greater hardshi…
Institutionalised ignorance in policy and regulation
Attributing public ignorance in vaccination narratives
The notion of an 'ignorant public' is attributed in outbreak scenarios through vaccination narratives that are institutionally reinforced by governments and the media across different contexts. The ignorant public narrative is a discursive shift that reduces public concerns about vaccines to a lack of knowledge, obscuring how these concerns are indicative of mistrust and anxiety or efforts to counter the dominance of acceptable and legitimate kno…
Methodological and Ethical Considerations when Conducting Qualitative Interview Research With Healthcare Professionals
The impacts of healthcare professionals (HCPs) being research participants are often neglected. As professionals, they tend to be perceived as 'immune' to many negative effects of sharing their experiences. However, in the context of an ongoing global pandemic such as COVID-19, these assumptions can be clearly challenged. This article draws on researchers' experiences of conducting single and longitudinal qualitative interviews with HCPs during t…
Co-producing Human and Animal Experimental Subjects
Preclinical (animal) testing and human testing of drugs and vaccines are rarely considered by social scientists side by side. Where this is done, it is typically for theoretically exploring the ethics of the two situations to compare relative treatment. In contrast, we empirically explore how human clinical trial participants understand the role of animal test subjects in vaccine development. Furthermore, social science research has only concentr…
Online on the frontline
This paper explores vaccine hesitancy among healthcare workers (HCWs) in the UK, where different COVID-19 vaccines were being rolled out through a national vaccination campaign from 2020 to 2022, consisting of a first and second dose programme. Through a mixed-method approach using qualitative discourse analysis and network analysis of Twitter data, we assessed HCW perceptions and views about the administration and delivery of COVID-19 vaccines i…
Pandemic preparedness
Whilst many lessons were learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing reflection is needed to develop and maintain preparedness for future outbreaks. Within the field of infectious disease and public health there remain silos and hierarchies in interdisciplinary work, with the risk that humanities and social sciences remain on the epistemological peripheries. However, these disciplines offer insights, expertise and tools that contribute to underst…
Examining the role of community champions to promote vaccine uptake in under-served communities in the United Kingdom
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how ethnic minority groups are disproportionally affected by health crises and the potential for community engagement to provide equitable public health information and services. Policymakers, practitioners, and academics have presented community engagement as a way to improve the access and uptake of health services, including vaccination, but the role of community members for health promotion is rarely ques…
‘Worm Wars’
What counts as evidence in global health? What happens when evidence is contested? This article concentrates on the ‘Worm Wars’, a public academic debate in 2015 on the effectiveness of health interventions to treat populations with parasitic worms, to assess how health interventions are appraised by different disciplinary perspectives. I discuss what happens when a success story about randomised control trials (or RCTs) – often hailed as the ‘go…
Political and Community Logics of Emergent Disease Vaccine Deployment
With a growing number of emerging infectious diseases and the rapid development of vaccines during epidemics and pandemics, public health officials at the global and national level have reported concerns about vaccine hesitancy, often attributing this to a problem of misinformation and poor understanding of risk. However, social scientists have found that vaccination perceptions are complex and multi-faceted. By focusing on the historical, cultur…
Effective altruism, technoscience and the making of philanthropic value
A recent philanthropic movement with advocates among high-profile tech entrepreneurs and philosophers, effective altruism (EA) has been widely disparaged for its flawed moral philosophy and conservative political implications. As philanthropic practice, however, it has been seldom studied. In this paper, we argue that claims to technoscientific expertise are central to how EA actors understand, legitimize, and take part in the production of phila…
What is unhealthy about public health? Vaccination, evidence and the politics of uncertainty
Recent developments in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union suggest that public health is undergoing a crisis that is both infrastructural and epistemic. Taking the 2026 revision of US childhood vaccination recommendations as a focal case, this commentary examines how vaccination has become a privileged terrain for the political weaponisation of scientific uncertainty. We argue that the wider pressures on public health inf…
Political science (20 works) · Medicine (15 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy (11 works) · Pandemic (8 works) · Public health (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Nursing (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Psychology (7 works)