COVID-19 Vaccine Boundary Work: The Case of Facebook Comments in Southeast Georgia

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although much research has considered the worldview of the vaccine hesitant, little attention has been given to the cultural conflict over what it means to be a person who takes vaccines. Through a qualitative content analysis of comments made on the Facebook pages of media outlets serving southeast Georgia, this analysis identifies both motives for rejecting the vaccine and outlines the symbolic boundaries that the vaccine hesitant have erected to distinguish themselves from vaccine advocates. The motives include perfunctory rejections, claims that the vaccine is ineffective, illegitimate, injurious in the short and long term, poisonous, infectious, particularly dangerous for children, and a component of conspiracy theories. These symbolic boundaries include distinguishing vaccine advocates from the vaccine hesitant by personal characteristics such as irrationality and authoritarianism. There are also social boundaries rooted in social locations – namely conservatives vs. liberals and non-elites vs. elites. This study also demonstrates how vaccine proponents engage with these symbolic boundaries. Vaccine proponents both contest and accept these boundaries. Likewise, pro-vaccine comments vary in terms of whether they stigmatize the boundary between vaccine user and non-user. This study adds to the literature on health communication and vaccines by confirming previous reports of the reasons for not taking the COVID-19 vaccine, indicating that public communication on vaccines is not regionally specific, and demonstrating the role that ostensible vaccine advocates might play in contributing to vaccine hesitancy.