Since the emergence of the first COVID-19 vaccines towards the end of 2020, different voices have called for its acceptance or rejection. Despite the enormous amount of official information from WHO, the international scientific community and state health authorities, three years after the beginning of the pandemic, there is still an infodemic questioning the very existence of the disease, as well as the need of vaccination.
In mid-2021, a few anthropologists and social scientists from the IUAES Commission on the Anthropology of Pandemics formed a research group to focus on and analyze the different factors and circumstances that guide people’s behaviors towards COVID-19 vaccines, at both the individual and collective levels, and which can mediate/influence their acceptance, hesitancy or rejection.
We believed that an anthropological approach to this complex issue, based on ethnographic research, would allow us to better understand the different realities regarding COVID-19 vaccination in various countries and populations worldwide, including Mexico, Israel, India, Brazil, United States, Colombia, Peru, and Cameroon. For this purpose, an interview guide was developed in Spanish and English, piloted in both languages and thereafter, it was also translated into additional languages (Portuguese, French and Hebrew). From the beginning of 2022, research was conducted in the different countries, with a follow up of periodic working meetings of the core group of researchers from our Commission.
The round table proposed will focus on the primary findings of this cross-country study, encouraging discussion from the community of anthropologists attending the conference.
