Molea [Abstract]

The controversy around the vaccine against Covid-19
[Full text]

Raluca Molea [1]

Abstract: Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the phenomenon known as conspiracy theories started to develop under the uncertainty of what is going to happen next and why we are forced to live in times like that. Meanwhile, researchers tried to develop as soon as possible a vaccine that would mitigate the damage caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and eventually put an end to this pandemic. But, the effort of creating a vaccine is threatened by a vast number of people that tend to reject the idea of vaccination because of distrust in vaccine efficiency, fear related to side effects, the composition of vaccine and so on. What fuels these negative attitudes towards anti-Covid-19 vaccination are the controversies born from conspiracy theories, that tend to be attractive to some categories of people, such as younger individuals, women, people with low-income levels, a low level of education and people from ethnic minorities. In this paper, I tried to capture what are the reasons for people’s vaccine hesitancy, and how we can resolve this problem.

Keywords: Vaccine hesitancy; Conspiracy theories; Distrust; Vaccine attitudes;

[1] National Scientific Research Institute for Labour and Social Protection, Bucharest, Romania, raluca.molea@incsmps.ro