Serious adverse event

Digital Discourse Analysis on Facebook regarding the suspension of Coronavac trials during the Covid-19 health crisis

Abstract

This study investigated the discursive dynamics of vaccine denialism on Facebook in 2020. The goal was to identify anti-vaccine discourses within the context of the clinical trials for the development of Coronavac. The study includes eight public posts in Portuguese related to the episode of the suspension of the Butantan Institute's vaccine trials (developed in partnership with the Chinese laboratory Sinovac) due to the death of a volunteer. The corpus was obtained from a survey of 45,097 public posts in Portuguese made on Facebook between March 17 and November 30, 2020, that included at least one of the two terms: “Chinese vaccine” or “Coronavac.” The data collection was carried out using CrowdTangle, a digital tool from Meta Platforms. To conduct the study, we relied on the theoretical framework of Digital Discourse Analysis (Paveau, 2021), in addition to the concepts of discursive virtue (Paveau, 2015) and pre-discourse (Paveau, 2013). We identified metaphors and antitheses used by speakers aiming to fuel vaccine hesitancy in the audience through disinformative content. We argue that, by activating pre-discursive elements in the connected audience, the speakers managed to foster a climate of vaccine denialism around the Butantan vaccine.