Vaccine Uptake

Research area:  Infection and Immunity

Improving vaccine confidence and uptake across the lifespan in Australia and globally.

Billions of dollars have been spent developing new, effective, and safe vaccines–and yet, nearly 20 million children don’t receive basic vaccines each year. Our group focuses on understanding and addressing the reasons for low vaccine uptake.

Our aims are to:

  • understand and diagnose the reasons for under-vaccination
  • target and support vaccine uptake in vulnerable populations
  • develop and evaluate interventions to increase vaccine uptake in Australia, the Western Pacific Region, and globally
  • inform effective, equitable and evidence-based vaccine policy in Australia.

 We have a range of projects that include:

  • Developing and testing interventions to improve vaccine uptake for pregnant women, children, high-risk populations and in low resource settings.
  • Designing and validating tools to measure vaccine acceptance and barriers to accessing vaccination.
  • Informing and evaluating policy, particularly the evaluation of vaccine mandates or studies to further inform immunisation policy.
  • Training and building capacity to implement and evaluate vaccine promotion strategies within Australia and the Western Pacific Region.

We have a strong interest in vaccine confidence, trust, health program resiliency and communication. Our work applies principles from social and behavioural science and uses both qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Our research

COVID-19 Vaccine Preparedness Study Summary

To support the COVID-19 vaccine program, the Victorian Government funded this research to find out if Victorians were planning to get the vaccine, what concerns people had, and what information they needed to make this decision.

Vaccine Uptake Symposium 2021

The Vaccine Uptake Group at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute focuses on building vaccine confidence and understanding and addressing the reasons for low vaccine uptake across the lifespan, for different vaccines, populations and settings.

Given the global focus on COVID-19 vaccine uptake this year, the symposium showcased some of our world-leading social science research on vaccine confidence and uptake of COVID-19 vaccines, and other vaccines, including three sessions on:

  • Understanding drivers and barriers to COVID-19 vaccine uptake in high-risk groups
  • Improving routine NIP vaccination in key priority groups
  • Global vaccination strategies to diagnose the causes of under-vaccination in different settings and tailor strategies to improve vaccine coverage

Groups