Happy New Year! We are excited to share our first episode of 2021. We were fortunate to speak to the IAPHS President, Dr. Kathie Mullan Harris, and Conference Co-Chairs, Drs. Maggie Hicken and Hedy Lee, who stopped by to tell us about their plans for this year’s conference, themed Racism, Power, and Justice: Achieving Population Health Equity. This theme is highly relevant given the current events of the day. Dr. Hicken also shared information with us about the upcoming joint IAPHS and University of Michigan Racism Lab symposium called Toxic Equilibrium: Structural Racism & Population Health Inequities on February 24^th. More information about the symposium can be found here.

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Increasingly, researchers and policymakers are designing place typologies to understand distributions of place characteristics that influence population health and to inform policy response options. This growth is fueled in part by expanded access to small area data and the availability of new statistical approaches. By identifying how sociodemographic, economic, and population characteristics align across places, typologies can elucidate patterns in what can otherwise be highly complex matrices of disparate data. Typologies thus serve an important descriptive function that enables policymakers in different places to have a common understanding of issues at stake. Characterizing how patterns and trends are associated with improved or worsened health outcomes may also serve to inform policy change opportunities to support improvements in population health, by either spotlighting trends or learning from outliers. At the same time, many users also identify limitations in the use of typologies for prediction purposes.

In this episode, speakers will present recent empirical work or works-in-progress to categorize cities or other places into typologies based on essential socioeconomic, population and other characteristics. Speakers will discuss uses and limitations of typologies as tools to inform policy, as well as efforts to assess associations with health and health disparity outcomes.

Session Chairs: Lorna Thorpe and Dante Chinni
Presenters: Justin Feldman, Usama Bilal, Ari Pinkus

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Recent outbreaks of vaccine preventable diseases such as measles have heightened concern over suboptimal vaccination rates. Undervaccination may be due to access barriers, hesitancy over the safety and effectiveness of vaccination, or both. A variety of strategies exist to encourage greater vaccine uptake, including increasing access to vaccination services, improving vaccine education among youth and parents, providing incentives such as financial bonuses to parents with up-to-date children, and mandating vaccination of schoolchildren without approved exemptions. Child vaccine mandates are ubiquitous in the USA and employed internationally in various ways.

Vaccine mandates vary in several key elements, including: target population, what is required, consequences for noncompliance, who is in charge of enforcement, and—perhaps most hotly debated—procedures for exemption. In US states, efforts to remove religious and philosophical exemptions, for example, have become hotly politicized and subject to backlash including protests and ballot measure recall efforts. While the legal and ethical dimensions of such policies are often discussed, conclusions regarding the effectiveness of mandates as a strategy—particularly when they are met with public resistance—remains a thorny issue, as context and implementation factors likely play a substantial role in the success of mandate policies.

This interactive panel will present a range of evidence-based perspectives on the question: Are mandates the way forward for population vaccine coverage? Panelists from multiple disciplines will describe their research using different approaches to assess the effectiveness of vaccine mandate policies and assert a stance regarding the use of mandates as a policy lever. The moderator will facilitate a lively question and answer session following these presentations, inviting the audience to participate in the dialogue around how to study and implement policy on this challenging topic.

Session Chair: Devon Greyson
Presenters: Richard Carpiano, Kolina Koltai, Andrea Polonijo

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