MandEval
Australia mandated COVID-19 vaccination in ways that varied by state, by occupation and by time, and then unwound those mandates on a similar patchwork. That variation is the identification strategy. MandEval uses it to ask what the mandates did, what they cost in trust and compliance elsewhere, and what design the public would actually accept.
Funded through the Medical Research Future Fund under the Early to Mid-Career Researchers scheme. The multi-institution programme received approximately $4.75 million, of which $808,440 was allocated to the University of Newcastle.
Three questions
Did uptake rise, or did it move? A mandate that lifts vaccination this month may only be pulling next month’s vaccinations forward. Separating a pull-forward effect from a net effect changes the verdict on whether a mandate worked, and it requires a design that can see the timing rather than the total.
What else moved? Mandates operate on people who have other things to lose. The consequences beyond the vaccination rate are part of the evaluation, not an afterthought to it.
What would the public accept? A mandate has design parameters: who it covers, what the exemptions are, what happens if you decline, how long it lasts. Choice experiments let us ask which combinations retain public support and which do not, before rather than after.
Outputs
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- An open repository of mandate studies with a worked scoping review of the quasi-experimental evidence.
- eMANDEVAL, which puts the preference estimates in front of people designing policy.
- A study protocol for the uptake analysis across Australia and international comparators.
See papers for the published work.