Making sense of the link between anti-establishment politics and vaccine hesitancy

Lecture given online on 18 May 2021The workshop 'Turning the Tide: Contemporary Challenges to Health and Healthcare in Europe and Beyond' is organized as a series of 5 lectures with renowned speakers who have worked on the topic of health and healthcare from different angles, with the Max Weber Fellows acting as moderators in 2021.Vaccines and vaccination programmes are amongst the most remarkable achievements of, respectively, medical science and public health. Even though vaccines provide the only clear path out of the death and devastation caused by Covid-19, a significant minority of people in Western Europe and the North America have said they will not get vaccinated. There is a strong association between voting for anti-establishment political parties and vaccine hesitancy. This talk argues that support for populist politicians and low vaccine confidence are driven by similar dynamics: a profound distrust in elites and experts. Public health actors traditionally aim to improve vaccine uptake by raising awareness about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. There are limits to this strategy, however. The distrust of elites and experts that is driving vaccine hesitancy will be difficult to resolve unless its underlying causes—i.e., political disenfranchisement and economic marginalisation—are also addressed