Editor’s Pick, June 2015: Mark Navin and Heidi Malm
The editor’s pick for June is a timely pair of papers by Mark Navin and Heidi Malm that extend the contentious vaccination debates taking place in the United States to the domain of immigration justice.
First, in “HPV and the Ethics of CDC’s Vaccination Requirements for Immigrants,” Navin offers a defense of immunization mandates for migrants. He begins by critiquing the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) short-lived, pre-2009 policy that was used to exclude female immigrants who were not vaccinated for human papillomavirus (HPV). He then evaluates CDC’s new criteria, arguing that they replace the murky ethical commitments of the old policy with explicit moral reasons that can be justified from within competing perspectives on immigration justice. Thus on his view the policy shift constitutes a clear instance of moral progress that preserves the rights of both migrants and nation states. But even in light of this progress, Navin believes the new criteria may have been misapplied. He concludes by suggesting how they could still license exclusion based HPV vaccination status—a startling conclusion, given that the criteria were designed to avoid this very result.
In response, Heidi Malm argues against Navin’s narrower claim that an HPV vaccine mandate is justifiable. In “Immigration Justice and the Grounds for Mandatory Vaccinations,” Malm agrees that the new CDC criteria are vastly superior to the old, but she doubts how well they apply to the case of HPV. After providing a history of the stigma created by the health and immunization requirements for immigration into the US, Malm argues that uninfected, unvaccinated persons do not pose the right kind of threat to ‘herd immunity’ or public health to warrant exclusion.
The editor’s pick for June is a timely pair of papers by Mark Navin and Heidi Malm that extend the contentious vaccination debates taking place in the United States to the domain of immigration justice.
First, in “HPV and the Ethics of CDC’s Vaccination Requirements for Immigrants,” Navin offers a defense of immunization mandates for migrants. He begins by critiquing the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) short-lived, pre-2009 policy that was used to exclude female immigrants who were not vaccinated for human papillomavirus (HPV). He then evaluates CDC’s new criteria, arguing that they replace the murky ethical commitments of the old policy with explicit moral reasons that can be justified from within competing perspectives on immigration justice. Thus on his view the policy shift constitutes a clear instance of moral progress that preserves the rights of both migrants and nation states. But even in light of this progress, Navin believes the new criteria may have been misapplied. He concludes by suggesting how they could still license exclusion based HPV vaccination status—a startling conclusion, given that the criteria were designed to avoid this very result.
In response, Heidi Malm argues against Navin’s narrower claim that an HPV vaccine mandate is justifiable. In “Immigration Justice and the Grounds for Mandatory Vaccinations,” Malm agrees that the new CDC criteria are vastly superior to the old, but she doubts how well they apply to the case of HPV. After providing a history of the stigma created by the health and immunization requirements for immigration into the US, Malm argues that uninfected, unvaccinated persons do not pose the right kind of threat to ‘herd immunity’ or public health to warrant exclusion.