How policymakers employ ethical frames to design and introduce new policies: the case of childhood vaccine mandates in Australia

Australian states exclude unvaccinated children from early education and care via ‘No Jab No Play’ policies, but some offer exemptions for the socially disadvantaged. Such mandatory vaccination policies provoke heated arguments about morality potential downstream impacts, politics of which kinds people get exempted mandates are often fraught. Synthesising existing frameworks considering role moral principles rational-technical justifications in policymaking, we show how same values can be focus both ‘rational-instrumental’ ‘morality’ frames, while ‘pragmatic’ approaches crowded out by high epistemic or certainty.