Social Causes of Vaccine Rejection-Vaccine Indecision Attitudes in the Context of Criticisms of Modernity

Abstract

As most of the diseases that ravaged human collectivities through millennia have been cured by scientific tools offered to the use of medicine particularly from the Industrial Revolution onwards, vaccination played a crucial role in it. Once conceived as a significant public function, vaccination has been one of the most salient signs of regulatory and social reformist state power. However, together with the rise of globalization and the general state of fluidity stemming from it, on the one hand, communication technology has diffused diverse information around the world, particularly the false ones, and on the other hand, a widespread critical climate against modern conceptions has been formed. In this context of complex reality, vaccination has lost its undoubted public function and meaning. Since 1990s in the world and 2000s in Turkey, we observe a significant, though proportionally still meagre, tendency of refusal or hesitation concerning vaccines, mostly among parents. We analyze this tendency as complex assemblage of causes, both in economic and philosophical dimensions, a multiplex phenomenon which should be understood essentially in a general framework of critique against modernity.

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