The doctor and philosopher Anne-Marie Moulin returns to the notion of “vaccine hesitation” which, according to her, does not rely on the diversity of motivations.
Collected About by
Anne-Marie Moulin is a doctor, tropical disease specialist, philosopher and director of research emeritus at the CNRS (Sphere Laboratory of Philosophy and History of Science – Paris-I-Panthéon-Sorbonne). It has been conducting for several decades of research on immunology and immunization crossing history and philosophy. It is the latter of the adventure of vaccination (Fayard, 1996) and has been part of 2016 of the Citizen Conscious Consultation Orientation Committee, created as part of the consultation organized by the Minister of Health From the time, Marisol Touraine, on the maintenance of the immunization obligation in a context of decreasing vaccine covers. In the article “The vaccine hesitation or impatiences of global health”, appeared on the site the life of ideas, on May 4, 2021, it poses a critical look at the recent concept of ” Vaccine hesitation “, on which the actors of international public health rely to probe the intentions of vaccination.
Where does the concept of vaccine hesitation come from?
It has been established since the early 2010s to replace what historians hitherto called “resistance to vaccination”, and public health professionals, “acceptability”. It was soon adopted by all global health actors, including both international institutions such as the World Health Organization and philanthropic foundations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The vaccine hesitation is insured with all possible angles, depending on the age, sex, occupation, country or the type of vaccine. The interlocutors are surveyed on their confidence in the efficacy and safety of vaccines, and, in short, the concept of “vaccine hesitation” has remodeled the conceptual and epistemological horizon of the ratio of immunization and vaccines.
The term was devoted in 2016 by the American anthropologist Heidi Larson, following an international investigation to assess the perception of vaccination in the public. This term found in December 2021 in the current issue 116 and public health record, review of the High Council of Public Health (HCSP), devoted to the crisis due to COVID-19.
Why Criticize this concept?
The global health actors seized itself because it is a sweetened term, which, at the beginning, avoided the stigmatization of the antivax, an easy expression, which encounters a soft consensus and evaded the issues that are annoying. But it is up to stick together very different motivations, and finally, in the context of the Pandemic of Covid-19, it will be taken over by the French government, for example to explain the laborious departure of the immunization campaign at the end From the year 2020. Later, it will lead to stigmatize globally people who are not vaccinated without worrying about the diversity of citizens. However, it would be why the executive remembers that citizens are different individuals, and that any generality amounts to transforming the country into barracks and putting people at pitch.
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