Abstract

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). First, 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. Second, 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.

Bio

Elena Semino is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. She is the director of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences, as well as a member and current lead of the International Consortium for Communication in Health Care. Her research interests are in health communication, medical humanities, stylistics, and metaphor theory and analysis. Her work combines qualitative analysis with corpus linguistic methods. One of the many projects she is currently involved with is the ESRC-funded project Questioning Vaccination Discourse: A Corpus-based Study, applying linguistic methods to better understand pro- and anti-vaccination views.