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The far-right and anti-vaccine attitudes: lessons from Spain’s mass COVID-19 vaccine roll-out

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  • Serrano-Alarcon, Manuel
  • Mckee, Martin
  • wang, Yuxi
  • Kentikelenis, Alexander
  • Stuckler, David

Abstract

Far-right politicians in several countries have been vocal opponents of COVID-19 vaccination. But does this matter? We take advantage of repeated cross-sectional surveys with samples of around 3,800 individuals across Spain conducted monthly from December 2020 to January 2022 (n = 51,294) to examine any association between far-right politics and vaccine hesitancy. Consistent with prior data, we found that far-right supporters were almost twice as likely to be vaccine-hesitant than the overall population in December 2020, before vaccines became available. However, with a successful vaccine roll out, this difference shrank, reaching non-significance by September 2021. From October 2021, however, vaccine hesitancy rebounded among this group at a time when the leadership of the far-right promoted a “freedom of choice” discourse common among anti-vax supporters. By the latest month analyzed (January 2022) far-right voters had returned to being twice as likely to be vaccine-hesitant and 7 percentage points less likely to be vaccinated than the general population. Our results are consistent with evidence that far-right politicians can encourage vaccine hesitancy. Nonetheless, we show that public attitudes towards vaccination are not immutable. Whereas a rapid and effective vaccine rollout can help to overcome the resistance of far-right voters to get vaccinated, they also seem to be susceptible to their party leader's discourse on vaccines.

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  • Serrano-Alarcon, Manuel & Mckee, Martin & wang, Yuxi & Kentikelenis, Alexander & Stuckler, David, 2022. "The far-right and anti-vaccine attitudes: lessons from Spain’s mass COVID-19 vaccine roll-out," OSF Preprints cvq78, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:osfxxx:cvq78
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/cvq78
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    1. Agranov, Marina & Elliott, Matt & Ortoleva, Pietro, 2021. "The importance of Social Norms against Strategic Effects: The case of Covid-19 vaccine uptake," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 206(C).
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