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Anti-Covid Vax people are individuals who resisted or completely refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine. It is considered deviant because it contradicts what health professionals were stating as what would control the pandemic. And what majority of society was doing, going against the societal norm. This Topic is worth studying because understanding their stance can improve public health policies, and explores the issues in trusting science and authority of the government.

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Attitude applied because these people have beliefs that oppose what majority of society deemed necessary to stop the pandemic. These people often have distrust in the government, and public health institutions. Behavior also applies because they refused to get vaccinated. Some joined protests, posted on social media about it, spreading misinformation, some even used fake vaccination cards to get around it. But there is study that found most people who refused the vaccine also refused to get educated on it, leading to an uneducated stance. (Paragraph 2, News Medical)

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Selected applies because people willingly choose to not get vaccinated. Being Anti-COVID vaccination is a choice they made, along with choosing to post, and join protests about it. You could even say “sick” applies because some medical professionals say that extreme anti-vax people are irrational and could be in “psychosis, cognitive rigidity, or nonpsychotic denial of reality.” (Paragraph 7, psychiatrist.com) The public may even view them as unwell for rejecting scientific facts.

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-Anti-COVID vax people can fit into the tribal stigma that Goffman explained. While anti-vax beliefs aren’t something you are born into it can still apply because they create a strong group of like minded people. Often viewing their group as a movement against government control. (Paragraph 1, NIH.gov)

-Anti-COVID vax people can be both discredited or discreditable depending on how open they are about their beliefs. If they are open about their beliefs like not wearing their face mask during the mandate, spreading their views on social media or joining protests that went against the mandates, they are discredited. They could also be discreditable if they chose to hide their beliefs. If they are unvaccinated and people don’t already know they can pass as “normal” in public spaces. But on the day to day anti-covid vax individuals are discreditable because their differentness cannot be immediately perceivable.

-Applying blemishes of individual character, society can label them as morally or intellectually flawed for rejecting the vaccine during a world wide pandemic. They are viewed as misinformed and gullible for rejecting scientific research, which is why blemishes of individual character applies.

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Anti- COVID vax people do not view themselves as deviant. They often view their actions as rational, they have a belief in personal freedom, and distrust the government. A lot of these individuals have a full time career of it, not stopping at just the COVID-19 vaccine but even not getting their children immunizations or flu shots. But some of these individuals might only refuse the covid vaccine due to the misinformation they were reading online while still accepting other vaccines. They feared the unknown side effects, due to the speed it was developed. But a lot of them didn’t stop at the covid vaccine, their beliefs were reinforced by finding like minded people on social media.

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In my world view people who refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine affected not only them but everyone around them. Lower vaccine rates lead to higher transmission of COVID, which hospitalized and killed people. In personal experience when everyone was getting the vaccine I was in high school. My classmates whose parents didn’t let them get the vaccine were initially excluded from sports and extracurricular activities. Not being able to participate in your own community can be isolating especially for teenagers. Eventually they were allowed to participate but had to get covid tested weekly which not only costed money from the school but also signaled them out amongst a very left leaning school who majority got the vaccine. There were some positives that came out of this. Efforts to make scientific research more transparent and easily accessible to the public increased. The societal response to anti-covid vax individuals was the government mandating it for workplaces, travel, and some public places. I know for my father who didn’t want to get the vaccine he was eventually forced to get it or risked losing his job. There was a lot of public backlash, facing social-stigma. They got labels as ignorant and irresponsible, people were losing jobs, and relationships from it.

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-We can apply the social constructionist/relativist conception to anti-covid vax individuals. This concept is that no behavior is inherently deviant until constructed by society. There has been some level of anti-vax people around, but it didn’t get stigmatized as it did before covid. The refusal of the COVID-19 vaccine was more of a public health concern than before being a personal health choice.

-Labeling theory can be applied (micro level) looking at how some anti-covid vax people might react to being labeled as that. They say they are “pro-choice” rather than “anti-vax.”

-Critical perspective is that marginalized groups have historically been neglected by the medical field. They have deep seated skepticism due to the systematic oppression they have gone through.

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1.        Key academic scholars are not on the side of anti-covid vax people. They view them as deviant against what scientific research says, and what the majority of society agrees with. They do understand there may be underlying reasons that they didn’t want to get the vaccine, like fear of needles or how marginalized groups have often been mistreated by medical professionals.

-            Hornsey, Matthew J. 2022.nReasons Why People May Refuse COVID19 Vaccination (and What Can Be Done About It). World Psychiatry 21. Retrieved February 26th, 2025 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9077616/

-              Goffman. Erving, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Touchstone (Reissue edition). 1986. 2 ISBN: 978-06716224422

-  News-Medical. 2024. Cognitive Distortions and Deliberate Ignorance Lead to COVID-19 Vaccine Refusal, Study Says. News-Medical.net, September 17.  Retrieved February 26th, 2025          https://www.news-medical.net/news/20240917/Cognitive-distortions-and-deliberate-ignorance-lead-to-COVID-19-vaccine-refusal-study-says.aspx

-   Goldberg, Joseph F. 2021.How Should Psychiatry Respond to COVID-19 Anti-Vax Attitudes? The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.    Retrieved February 26th, 2025   https://www.psychiatrist.com/jcp/how-should-psychiatry-respond-to-covid-19-anti-vax-attitudes/

-Armitage, Richard. 2021. Online Anti-Vax Campaigns and COVID-19: Censorship Is Not the Solution. Public Health. Retrieved February 26th, 2025

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7834951/

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Vaccine scepticism has existed since the advent of the technology itself. However, the mass uptake of social media is blamed for the significant traction recently gained by the 'anti-vax' movement. A recent report found that 400 anti-vax social media accounts contain 58 million followers based primarily in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Misinformation campaigns such as these have contributed to the decline in routine childhood vaccination uptake, infection outbreaks stripping numerous European countries of their 'measles-free' status and the World Health Organization naming vaccine hesitancy as a top ten threat to global public health.

The international spread of SARS-CoV-2 has focussed the attention of anti-vax campaigners on the development of vaccines against COVID-19. Since the start of the pandemic, the largest anti-vax social media accounts have gained more than 7. 8 million followers, an increase of 19% since 2019. This has triggered the UK government and social media platforms to agree a package of measures to reduce online vaccine disinformation, including the labelling of posts marked as untrue by third party fact checkers. However, as vaccine trials report encouraging results, , there have been calls to introduce emergency laws that impose financial and criminal penalties on social media platforms that do not remove vaccine misinformation or fail to close down anti-vax campaign groups. Whilst tackling widespread vaccine misinformation is of vital importance, laws of this nature should not be implemented for three main reasons.

Firstly, many people have legitimate concerns around the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines due to factors including the speed of their development, the underrepresentation of ethnic minority groups in clinical trials and the unknown longevity of their immunological effects. The public must feel freely able to voice these concerns, raise challenging questions and expect transparent replies from trusted institutions. An unintended effect of shutting down anti-vax groups may be to silence those with legitimate questions for fear of shame or ridicule and lead them to harbour greater suspicion of public health authorities and sympathise with anti-vax rhetoric.

Secondly, such emergency laws would enforce censorship and deplatforming and threaten the democratic cornerstone of freedom of speech. All ideas - even the bad ones - must be allowed a public airing, and their qualities debated in the marketplace of ideas. It is through this process that institutions foster influence, respect and public trust, by presenting empirical evidence, reasoned arguments and a scientific method based on critical thinking. Conversely, widespread deplatforming of anti-vax campaigners is unlikely to dissuade those sympathetic to these messages but rather reinforce their strongly held beliefs about vaccine conspiracies while deepening their mistrust of public health authorities. In addition, removing the social media stages of anti-vax campaigners is likely to drive them underground to adopt alternative stages that are more difficult to identify, monitor and respond to with public health messaging. The lack of evidence to support censorship as a reliable means of producing desirable health behaviour change should deter against the deployment of this strategy.

Thirdly, the features of an 'anti-vax campaign' are themselves undetermined and, depending on the breadth of the definition imposed, may include both the mere voicing of concern for vaccine safety and the intentional distribution of dangerous falsities. Governments will be without the substantial resources required to identify all online anti-vax campaigns and thus will be forced to handover decision-making powers to social media platforms themselves. This is unlikely to be an optimal strategy for the delivery of public health messaging and risks triggering dangerous normative shifts in the ability of social media platforms to control what the public is and is not able to see.

The anti-vax movement poses a huge threat to global public health, particularly in the era of COVID-19. However, censorship and deplatforming are unlikely to improve this situation but may unintentionally exacerbate it. Instead, governments should recommit to providing clear, consistent, regular, frequent and accessible public health messaging that is highly visible to the public and transparent about what is, and is not, known to the scientific community. Attention should be drawn to the plethora of benefits enjoyed by humanity to date as a consequence of global mass vaccination programmes and contrasted with the recent setbacks and harms caused by prominent campaigns of anti-vax misinformation. In this manner, public trust in vaccination programmes, medical professionals and public health institutions will be reinstated at the time it is needed most.

5. Burki T. The online anti-vaccine movement in the age of COVID-19. The Lancet Digital Health. 01 October 2020;2(10):504-505. doi: 10.1016/S2589-7500(20)30227-2. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

10. Chastain D.B., Osae S.P., Henao-Martínez A.F. Racial disproportionality in covid clinical trials. N Engl J Med. August 2020;27 doi: 10.1056/NEJMp2021971. 383:e59. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

Articles from Public Health are provided here courtesy of Elsevier

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Online 'anti-vax' campaigns and COVID-19: censorship is not the solution

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Vaccine scepticism has existed since the advent of the technology itself. However, the mass uptake of social media is blamed for the significant traction recently gained by the 'anti-vax' movement. A recent report found that 400 anti-vax social media accounts contain 58 million followers based primarily in the US, UK, Canada and Australia.