Vaccines as populist tropes in the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

With lives, livelihoods, and entire societies at stake, immunisation was as a matter of immense political and social importance throughout the global health crisis. Using the framework of medical populism, this paper articulates the emergence of vaccines for COVID-19 as a populist trope by using three countries with diverse contexts and distinct vaccine responses – Brazil, the Philippines, and the United States – as case studies, drawing on the discourses and actions of their heads of states from March 2020 to December 2021. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte engaged in ‘vaccine messianism’, offering the promise of future vaccines as a simplistic solution to the pandemic. In the US, President Donald Trump dramatised his vaccine project and tied it to his ‘America First’ politics in what has been called ‘vaccine nationalism’. Meanwhile, in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro’s ‘vaccine skepticism’ helped forge divisions between his constituencies and global elites as well as political opponents. Overall, the case studies show how medical populist performances evolved during the pandemic, and how the use of vaccine as a populist trope was linked to immunological, and often exclusionary, notions of nationalism.

Keywords

• Medical populism
• vaccination
• COVID-19
• pandemics
• politics of health
• SDG 3: good health and well-being