The shameful dead. Vaccine hesitancy, shame and necropolitics during COVID-19

Abstract

As mass vaccination programmes for COVID-19 gathered pace, they were was accompanied by a nexus of social and political shaming around vaccine hesitancy or refusal. Frequently, shame has been directed at individuals posthumously; for example, in the online sharing of obituaries for notable or vocal anti-vaxxers. While some of the most visible instances of ‘death shaming’ have been decried, they nonetheless remain as extreme iterations – and a logical product – of a more pervasive culture of shame over vaccination, or lack of it. Rather than paying close attention to the contexts (including a trusting and shame-less engagement with public health messaging and communication) which enable different publics to make informed decisions about vaccination, the ‘unvaccinated’ have increasingly taken on the characteristics of a shamed population, culpable for the spread of the virus, for other adverse health outcomes produced by a health system under strain, for the threat of future public health restrictions to everyday life, and for their own suffering and death. In turn, explicit death-shaming has sedimented down into a broader sense of inevitability around deaths that might otherwise be shocking or difficult to ignore. In this chapter, we examine recent discourses on vaccine hesitancy, death and dying through a ‘shame lens’. Future crises, we suggest, will introduce novel relationships between shame and death; critical reflection on the COVID-19 pandemic allows us to anticipate some of the contexts and processes which are likely to condition how and where they land.