Metaphors and Vaccines: Opportunities and Challenges

What do memories, raincoats and snakes have in common?

They have all been used as metaphors for vaccines by people with different views and communicative goals. This talk is concerned with how, why and with what potential consequences metaphors are used to communicate about vaccines by different people in different contexts, including popular science books, public health campaigns and podcasts by celebrity anti-vaxxers. It shows how different metaphors are used to achieve different communicative goals, from explaining how rapidly-developed vaccines are safe to suggesting that vaccines are part of a large-scale conspiracy at the expense of ordinary people. Both opportunities and challenges arise from a consideration of these patterns in metaphor use and an appraisal of the world in the mid-2020s (e.g. a vaccine-hesitant government in the USA). Firstly, metaphors can be one of the tools to be deployed to address the loss of confidence in vaccines caused by the pandemic-related experience of being repeatedly infected by a virus after one or several vaccinations. Secondly, pro-vaccination metaphors by scientists and public health agencies tend to be clear and accessible but do not usually match the high emotional valence of anti-vaccination metaphors, nor the way in which anti-vaccination metaphors fit into a broader terrifying narrative of which vaccines are a part. An awareness of this mismatch may be helpful in crafting metaphorical and non-metaphorical future public health messages about vaccinations.

Speaker: Elena Semino (Lancaster University)
Respondent: Samantha Vanderslott (University of Oxford)

There will be a drinks reception following the talk.