The Anti-Vaxxer Attitude As A Socially Rooted Thought-Style

Hesitation towards COVID-19 vaccines is a multifaceted and context-dependent phenomenon that is being investigated through di!erent approaches and perspectives. This chapter focuses on the social roots of aversion to the COVID-19 vacci- nation, taking into account the moral panic resulting from the vaccine hesitancy felt by a not insigni#cant part of population during the pandemic. More speci- #cally, we take into consideration not only this hesitancy, but also explicit aversion towards vaccines, attempting to overcome the typical common-sense notion according to which the anti-vaxxer attitude seems to be a mere re"ection of impatience with the limits of freedom, mainly stemming from hyper-sociali- zation to radical neoliberal individualism.