Reasonable Trust through Deliberative Engagement: The Cases of Vaccines and Genome Editing

ABSTRACT

In this short commentary, I wish to briefly explore the generation and rebuilding of trust and trustworthiness in science and medicine in relation to two important contemporary societal phenomena – namely human germline (or heritable) genome editing technologies and anti-vaccine beliefs. In the course of this exploration, I argue that discussions of genome editing can be best described as dealing with the idea of a generation of trust, while discussions of vaccines and vaccine hesitancy can best be described as dealing with the rebuilding of trust. Furthermore, I argue that there may be an important, but not entirely absolute, distinction between the generation of trust in genome editing and the rebuilding of trust in countering vaccine hesitancy or anti-vaccine beliefs. In so far as this is the case, it may suggest that the form of deliberative engagement that is suitable for one context (genome editing) might not be suitable for the other (vaccines).

KEYWORDS:

• Trust
• genome editing
• vaccines
• deliberative engagement

Funding

This work is supported by the Hans Gottschalk-Stiftung.

Acknowledgments

I wish to sincerely give my thanks and appreciation to Georg Theiner, Solveig Lena Hansen and Iris Hilbrich for their wonderful support and patience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Oliver Feeney

Oliver Feeney is a postdoctoral researcher with the Research Unit 'Ethics of Genome Editing', at the Institute of Ethics and History of Medicine, University of Tübingen. His research primarily focuses on the ethics, social justice and governance issues of human genome editing technology.