Octavian GROZA, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania
Alexandru RUSU, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania
Given the present pandemic context, the article of R. I. Field, 2013 – What you see is what you fear. Visual imagery of vaccine-preventable diseases as a tool to counteract vaccine rejection – opens at least two potential directions of scientific reflection. The first one concerns the popular forms of resistance against the immunization process, resistance that is not visible only in the Eastern European space. The second direction is questioning the role of fear in the strategies of vaccination campaigns. Our research started from a simple observation: on the 15th of January 2022, all the former communist states in Europe were placed under the EU/EEA average (69.1%) of complete immunization, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. In order to explain these differences, we focused on the Romanian case study, with the specific objective to find an explanatory frame that could be extrapolated to other states in the region. Spatial analysis tools applied to explain the diffusion of the vaccination process have mitigated results, being unable to detect clear social and cultural factors backgrounding the observed spatial structures. Instead, the rapid accelerations on the vaccination cumulative curves, observed after the outbreak of different COVID-19 waves, indicate that fear might have a major role in accepting the vaccination, by different population groups. The spatial dynamics of the contamination-immunization pair corroborates the same hypothesis. The “speech anchored in fear” that was generated by individual experiences induced by social and spatial proximity seem to undermine the isolated pseudo-speeches of the postmodern system of communication. It also shaped a more implicit general discourse, enabling a unitary attitude oriented proactively to immunization. This hypothesis stays at the core of our presentation and is tested by a set of multi-scalar spatial analyses.
Mots clés : fear| immunization|spatial analysis|COV-ID|Romania
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