Mistrust, covert communities and health policy evaluation: Evidence from vaccine hesitancy research in Western Australia

During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world enacted vaccine mandates to drive vaccine uptake, limit infection transmission, and prevent overwhelm of health systems. Implications of mandate policies, however, included reduced community trust in government, more prolific vaccine disinformation, and social unrest driven by demands for greater freedom from institutional intrusion. It is vital to understand the impacts of these social phenomena for future policymaking. As part of a broader scale vaccine mandate evaluation project, we sought to understand a further, understudied, implication: how rejection of mandates propelled convergence of seemingly opposed ideological groups, such as proponents of right-wing conspiracy theories and those espousing New Age spirituality. Our study focused on Fremantle, Western Australia – a long-recognised progressive community. We planned to interview community members to trace processes that activated them to associate with a resistance movement, including protests, rallies, and online advocacy. However, we had little success as the individuals we sought to recruit were often distrustful of formal institutions and unwilling to engage with academic researchers. This paper analyses the failure of our methods. Drawing lessons, we posit that deep ethnography is a more appropriate methodology for policy evaluation research focused on covert or counterculture communities.