Hesitação e recusa vacinal como trama discursiva: estratégias de resistência à imunização na pandemia de covid-19

Vaccine hesitancy, widely studied as a public-health phenomenon, is often reduced to the effects of misinformation or so-called fake news. However, more than a mere informational miscue, vaccine hesitancy and refusal can be understood as a structured discursive fabric composed of utterances that confer legitimacy on the refusal of, or questioning about, immunization. Drawing entirely on my master’s dissertation, this article situates itself within the horizon of Foucaultian biopolitics to analyze the layers that emerge in discourses of vaccine hesitancy and refusal in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic. The specific objectives were: (i) to investigate vaccination discourses and practices in the country; (ii) to describe how the pandemic and its unfoldings traverse anti-vaccination utterances; (iii) to discuss the social world of vaccination in times of a health crisis; and (iv) to delineate proximities and differences between hesitancy and refusal. The corpus comprises posts made in two Facebook groups that connected individuals partially or wholly opposed to vaccination. Posts were identified via a search for the term “covid” and selected by number of interactions, in order to mitigate curatorial bias, considering that, on social networks, technodiscursive validation mobilizes regimes of visibility and authority. The central hypothesis holds that discourses opposing vaccination— frequently reduced to a “lack of information” or explained solely by the circulation of fake news— constitute a complex discursive fabric in which heterogeneous utterances articulate the (re)production of subjectivities and the reordering of truth criteria. The secondary hypothesis indicates that efforts to expand vaccination coverage require acknowledging the insufficiency—if not the absence— of consistent public discussions of pharmacovigilance in institutional and media discourses, a dimension that shapes expectations, beliefs, and trust. The analysis identified four recurring discursive strategies: (i) adoption of a christian morality that sacralizes the body and shifts protection to the realm of faith; (ii) adoption of “alternative health” discourses that re-signify prevention and immunity as natural self-care outside state– biomedical mediation; (iii) rejection of institutions (the state, health agencies, the media, the judiciary) through the delegitimation of their practices and decisions; and (iv) contestation of the scientific and market discourse of the chemical– pharmaceutical industry, which reinterprets vaccination as a mass experiment and heightened risk. These strategies do not operate in isolation: they compose dynamic intersections and overlaps, reorganized with each new discursive event, producing an economy of suspicion that shifts the vaccine from the axis of care/solidarity to that of risk/subjection. It follows that simplifying such discourses—reducing them to ignorance or informational error— tends to reinforce hesitancy and refusal themselves. Addressing them demands dialogic, transparent communication strategies sensitive to moral and community belongings, as well as the publicization of pharmacovigilance routines, so as to reinscribe vaccination within circuits of trust and shared care.