Proceedings of The 3rd World Conference on Research in Social Sciences
Year: 2021
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/3rd.socialsciencesconf.2021.10.53
Covid-19 Vaccination Discourse: Discrimination VS Protesting Movement
Gurevich Lyubov
ABSTRACT:
The problem, dealing with Covid-19 vaccination campaign, has become extremely urgent recently. It has spontaneously launched a severe emotion-charged societal response in the world community. The society has split into two oppositional categories according to vaccination status principle.
This article is aimed at providing of an in-depth look at three types of discourse (medical experts’, political and social media discourse), in order to figure out the essence of a new unprecedented type of discrimination which hasn’t been registered in the society before the Covid-19 pandemic. The analysis of social discourse rhetoric on the matter of vaccination offers a clue to understanding of the reasons of protesting movements as a result of societal response to discriminatory governmental actions, such as mandating of vaccination for certain categories of people, imposition of limitations for unvaccinated people, fees and even imprisonment, which amounted to human rights violation. Theoretically, vaccination status discrimination has proved to be a specific social phenomenon characterized by a unique set of features, which is extrinsic to a stereotyped mode of discrimination, reported in sociolinguistic research.
keywords: vaccination status discrimination; discourse analysis; Covid-19 pandemic; societal response; vaccination campaign.