Abstract
Although vaccination in the Czech Republic is mandatory and presented as an important part of public health policy, the number of parents who refuse childhood vaccination has increased in recent years. Thus, the Czech Republic follows the trend of some other European countries when vaccination coverage has started to decline.
In this paper we focus on the issue of compulsory vaccination and we employ qualitative analysis to define and examine policy design of vaccination policy and social construction of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children. The paper aims to answer whether and how the social construction is reflected in the public policy applied to the parents.
Our approach is based on the theory of the social construction of target population. The main findings point out that the negative image of parents refusing vaccines prevails in media and political discourse and the policy design is based on burdens.