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Can coronavirus threat sway the anti-vaxxers?

Katie AttwellThe West Australian
A 90 year old man getting a vaccination.
Camera IconA 90 year old man getting a vaccination. Credit: sdominick/Getty Images, sdominick

The messages arrive from friends near and far. “This coronavirus will put the anti-vaxxers out of business, right?” I research vaccination attitudes and policies for a living, so it’s not surprising that my friends reach out seeking confirmation of this hypothesis. But my response is, reluctantly, “no”.

There are good reasons to imagine coronavirus might restore doubters’ faith.

After all, people downgrade the necessity of vaccines when they have zero experience of the illnesses that they prevent. The polio vaccine seemed much more significant when family and friends were in iron lungs or graveyards. Back when the 2011 movie Contagion was a disaster thriller, instead of our actual lives, the desperate wait in isolation was a salient reminder that vaccines are truly lifesaving.

Coronavirus is too recent for formal academic research to analyse exactly how vaccine refusers are digesting it. But it’s possible to compare some coronavirus memes shared within anti-vaccine communities with existing research on vaccine refusal. This indicates that when it comes to COVID-19, it’s business as usual, but with a few important differences.

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I have identified four key tropes in recent coronavirus memes that are “business as usual”.

The first is that the risk of COVID-19 is exaggerated. It’s not as bad as people think, and therefore the global effort towards prevention is overblown. Vaccine-refusing parents frequently depict deadly diseases such as measles as mild “childhood illnesses”. Such beliefs inform their logic about why they don’t need vaccines. People accustomed to minimising disease threat apply the same reasoning to the novel coronavirus.

The coronavirus is reconfiguring our usual ways of understanding protection and social responsibility.

The second trope is that “the system”, or “sicko” mainstream life, kills far more people than COVID-19. In a 2017 research article, “The Unhealthy Other”, I explored how vaccine refusers depicted mainstream life, including doctors, their own extended families and the wider vaccine-accepting community. Vaccine refusers regarded “the unhealthy other” (that’s the rest of us) as shoving Panadol down our children’s throats, eating rubbish food and neglecting to take responsibility for our own health.

The vaccine refusers have a point — many of us could live healthier lives, and “the system” is full of preventable conditions such as obesity and type 2 diabetes. But a COVID-style response to our unhealthy Western life is not justifiable. Moreover, unhealthy behaviours are not directly infectious.

The third trope is probably the most important, underpinning the first two. Living a healthful life protects against illness, and hence is virtuous.

Many vaccine-rejecting parents invest immensely in the wellbeing of their families, from long-term breastfeeding to organic food to physical outdoor time. Many also utilise complementary and alternative medicines.

They believe these interventions negate the need for vaccinations. Some see them as direct replacements, while others simply believe that they are so healthy, vaccinations are not an issue. It is important to note that these parents love their children and believe they are making the best decision for their families. Memes shared within vaccine-refusing communities indicate that they do not regard themselves as susceptible to COVID-19 on the basis of their high-input, healthful lives.

The darker side of the third trope is the fourth trope. Diseases pick off the sick and unhealthy, and so are not our direct concern.

When you construct good health as a virtue, as opposed to good fortune, then maybe those who get sick deserve it. At the very least, they should expect it, due to their “sicko” mainstream lives. “Othering” the sick and the old makes young, healthy people feel safe. Vaccine refusers, in my research, depicted deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases as the product of other co-morbidities, not the disease. It was important that they saw victims as different from themselves.

So far, it’s business as usual. But there are three key differences to the coronavirus situation that will keep vaccine refusal an important space to watch.

First, vaccine refusal has predominantly been about children, since it is usually children whom we vaccinate to keep those “childhood illnesses” from killing them.

During this pandemic, most of us have been far more worried about our parents. How might vaccine refusers think differently about their parents’ vulnerabilities? We cannot control our parents’ diets or lifestyles.

Indeed, our parents are more likely to be the “unhealthy other”, reliant on pills for cholesterol or blood pressure.

In my research, some refusers thought that vaccines might still be appropriate for underprivileged children whose parents couldn’t offer them a healthful life. Despite being opposed to mandatory vaccinations, some even thought it might be acceptable for governments to make such families vaccinate.

The coronavirus is reconfiguring our usual ways of understanding protection and social responsibility. It will be interesting to see how our parents figure in this.

Second, given that vaccine refusers see themselves and their children as invulnerable, one might assume that they would be flagrant breakers of quarantine. I believe the opposite.

Although vaccine refusers are frequently criticised for having poor social responsibility, when it comes to staying home, they’ll be more than happy to do this. Vaccine refusal is associated with home schooling and highly intensive parenting habits that necessitate mothers (and it is almost always mothers) not working outside the home.

With a garden full of vegies, bedrooms full of high-quality toys, a store cupboard full of healthy grains and legumes, and a long list of wholesome activities, why would you ever leave the house again?

That this currently aligns with government advice — and many vaccine refusers were ahead of the curve in staying home — means that they are on the front-foot with social responsibility, for a change. It will be interesting to see if such positions can be leveraged back to vaccinations, now that we all truly understand how dependent we are on each other.

Third, mandatory vaccination is a bugbear of vaccine-refusing families. It doesn’t generally make them vaccinate — “It just forces hardship”, as a recent research article noted. Vaccine refusers are already resisting the idea that a COVID-19 vaccine will be mandatory.

None of us know what the circumstances of a vaccine introduction will be. But one thing is clear, the coronavirus’ burden among adults and the elderly means that if we do see mandates, they will look different to the current ones centred on children — although a COVID-19 vaccine may be included here, too. This may open up whole new sites of resistance among different age groups.

We live in unprecedented times, more akin to Hollywood fantasy than the world we used to know. Some things are changing for vaccine refusers, but others stay the same. All of us are hugging our children close, and loving our parents from afar. The lessons we learn, and the transformations we make, will inform the social world into which we re-emerge.

I’m counting on there being some differences among the same-old.

Dr Katie Attwell is an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Western Australia.

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