The first doses of the Covid-19 vaccines being administered across the EU in the last days of 2020 marked a critical passage point in the management of the pandemic. In these first weeks, the epidemiological value of the vaccines could be seen as largely symbolic, as the number of those able to be vaccinated is still quite limited. Yet symbols matter, and EU leaders have seized this opportunity to underline how both the approval of the vaccine, and the organization of the common ‘V [for vaccine] days’ across the Union are a ‘touching proof of unity’ in Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s words.
But as with all symbolic imaginaries this one, too, is not uncontested. Apart from the complex regulatory hurdles that the vaccines have had to face and the considerable logistical challenges of their transport, storage and administration, EU officials are being confronted with another crisis-within-a-crisis that risks undermining the success of the vaccination campaigns. It is this: in a significant number of EU states, an insufficient percentage of the general population is currently expressing its willingness to be vaccinated. Such doubters are far more substantial in numbers than outright anti-vaxxers and Covid-19 negationists, and while it is possible that once the vaccination campaigns have begun in earnest, public opinion will shift, the surprisingly low levels of public trust in the vaccines are drawing serious concern.
Communication about the vaccine is a crucial battleground for European leaders at this moment. For while in most EU states popular opposition to vaccines is being articulated around the right to ‘personal freedom’ regarding when (and if) to vaccinate, the information ecosystem shaping those choices is far from ‘free’, as various studies are showing, and has very little to do with ‘personal’ choices. Just as the Covid-19 pandemic itself, vaccination efforts are being made the object of campaigns of disinformation serving a variety of political interests, at the national, European but also global scales. Indeed, the geopolitics that will shape the success of the vaccination campaigns will not only be contested in big-power ‘global’ competition over the vaccines’ access, distribution and associated influence – it will also be fought over in much more mundane settings, on screens and newspapers, in a much less evident competition for Europeans’ ‘everyday’ geopolitical imaginaries of security and insecurity, trust and mistrust.
