"1. Introduction
... [W]e examine the expert literature on COVID-19 mandated vaccination for HCWs [health care workers]. We find that this literature neglects medical evidence contradicting the official claims about the safety and effectiveness of vaccination, dismisses decades-old scientific knowledge about the contextual nature of the virulence of microbial agents, miscalculates the impact of mandated vaccination policies on patient care and on the sustainability of health systems, and ignores or legitimizes the coercive elements built into their design...
4. Findings
...[W]e only identified records published between 2020 and 2023 because one inclusion criterion was an exclusive focus on COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The 41 included empirical studies were methodologically diverse and comprised quantitative observational studies (N: 25/41, 61%); qualitative studies (N: 9/41, 22%); and mixed methods studies (N: 7/41, 17%). Studies were also conducted in diverse locations including the United States of America [USA] (N: 19/41, 46%); Canada (N: 4/41, 10%); the United Kingdom [UK] (N: 3/41, 7%); Australia, Belgium, Switzerland, and Nigeria (N: 2/41, 5%); and Oman, Czech Republic, Finland, Greece, India, Poland, and Pan-European (N: 1/41, 2%)...
6. Conclusions
...[W]e propose that the narratives of blame and shame against HCWs presenting a range of degrees of resistance to official policy in the health sector are not an isolated phenomenon. Indeed, fear-producing health narratives that draw from (pseudo) scientific ideas and real or imagined consensuses have been deployed throughout history. While their objects have shifted over time, they resemble one another in that they have effectively suppressed dissent and unrest, drawing from what has been dubbed a 'cult of expertise'. Selected examples include the fear of European Jews, blamed for the bubonic plague to manage social struggles in the late Middle Ages, fear of lepers, revived from biblical times in the late 19th century to isolate immigrants from locals...
[I]n our era, COVID-19 is playing a functionally equivalent ideological role. Unlike in the past, the social identity of 'the Other' under COVID-19 is multiply constituted, cutting across race/ethnicity, gender, class, and political ideology, yet unified, in that it threatens the global social order on health matters. This 'Other' is projected by the establishment as challenging social spaces beyond health: thus, official documents warn about 'misinformation' threatening global health as well as global finance, the survival of the planet, trust in political institutions, and the very nature of democracy, calling for 'managing' or even 'suppressing' dissenters by setting 'safe' boundaries, physical and virtual, to permissible cognitions, attitudes, behaviors, and even speech acts."
© 2024 the Author(s), licensee AIMS Press.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0).