Table 2.

Rhetorical strategies.

1. Absurd!
Rhetoric that holds up public health practices and cultural expressions of care/anxiety over COVID-19 to ridicule. This includes ridiculing both experts and laypeople, sometimes through misrepresentation (see “Mountains and Molehills”). Key to this rhetorical strategy is an overall tone of mockery and/or contempt.
2. Appropriating Feminism and/or Womanhood
Anti-vaccination messages that appropriate the language and values of feminism, such as claiming that vaccine resistance is the positive moral equivalent of advocating for reproductive rights; also, sometimes appropriating themes of femininity, the stereotypes of maternal wisdom and nurturance.
3. Brave Truthteller
This strategy frames the speaker as brave for publicly voicing their anti-vaccine opinions, despite the potential for public backlash, parenting judgment, or criticism from supposed experts. This strategy celebrates vaccine resistance by depicting its messengers as heroic in their stand against the establishment, akin to a whistleblower standing up to corruption. Sometimes, this takes the form of the speaker themselves claiming he or she is brave; other times, someone else’s bravery is highlighted. In vaccine-hesitant and -resistant spaces, the bravery often pertains to standing up to others’ ridicule, or to the implication that one is a bad parent.
4. DYOR (Do Your Own Research)
This approach often states a conclusion contrary to mainstream beliefs or scientific consensus, and then urges the audience to research the reasons why the conclusion is correct. This leads inquiring minds to build their own arguments in favor of a predetermined position. Other times, this strategy is deployed to avoid answering questions or engaging in debate. The implication is that if audiences reach the correct conclusions (i.e., the ones the speaker asserted), then they have done good research. If they disagree, their research must have been bad.
5. Epic Significance
The struggle against vaccination is framed as one of global, historical, or even mythic proportions. Hyperbolic rhetoric and superlatives are used to convey that this threat is profound enough to change the world, to enshrine the power of a corrupt elite—or to imperil the most vulnerable among us (children). In addition to the exaggeration of the threat posed by vaccines, this strategy positions the audience as capable of, or even obligated to, participate in this epic quest for justice.
6. A Global Movement/Sleeping Giants
Rather than inflating the threat of the vaccine to epic proportions, this strategy inflates the anti-vaccine movement itself. The voices of ordinary people all around the world are depicted as speaking as one, a unified, grassroots groundswell against evil. Sometimes anti-vaccine and anti-public health movements are framed as just the beginning of a groundswell that addresses other conspiracies. This strategy employs a populist frame that all over the world, good ordinary people (“just plain folks”) are ready to rise up and take back the power over their own lives.
7. Health Freedom
This strategy frames public health as a matter of individual freedom rather than collective responsibility. Sometimes, this even borrows from the language of women’s reproductive rights, re-appropriating concepts such as “my body, my choice” to vaccines. This is sometimes related to religious freedom (vaccines) or freedom of speech (anti-mask).
8. Hijacking Familiar Formats
In general, memes work by using a familiar format to make a new joke or prove a new point. Rhetorical strategies that hijack formats adopt popular formats that are associated with harmless humor and use that familiarity to lower our emotional and cognitive defenses. With its audiences’ critical defenses down, it then presents its manipulative message. Beyond memes, this also applies to TV, film, and game formats that are appropriated for propaganda. This strategy also includes “hashtag hijacking,” where vaccine misinformation will be tagged with hashtags relating to less controversial issues and groups, such as #blacklivesmatter or #americancancersociety. Hashtag hijacking is particularly effective for exposing newcomers to anti-vaccine messages.
9. Intersecting Social Justice
Rhetoric similar to this frames vaccine skepticism alongside social justice issues or frames vaccine skepticism itself as a social justice issue in its own right. Sometimes, it may invoke systemic racism or the abuse of minorities by the police to imply that the medical establishment is similarly racist. It may frame its argument more generally, too, presenting vaccine resistance as a matter of either civil rights or religious conscience. It may describe non-vaccinators as “health minorities” or “dissidents.”
10. Lovebombing
Allies and fellow “truth-tellers” are showered with affirmation, accolades, validation, and compliments. This often includes emotive videos or images celebrating allies for their cause as heroes or persecuted saints (see also: “Sleeping Giants”).
11. Mountains and Molehills
Risks and benefits to vaccines are presented with intentionally distorted proportions. Extremely small risks (e.g., negative reactions to a vaccine) are framed as catastrophic and universal. Simple and far-reaching solutions (e.g., mask mandates) are presented as onerous and ineffective. This strategy distorts the risk/reward calculus of vaccines in order to seed doubt, often by emphasizing fringe or outlier cases of vaccine injury.
12. Panic Button
A common rhetorical technique that uses audio and visual cues intended to spark alarm, disgust, confusion, squeamishness, anxiety, or dread in audiences. Ominous music can be used to indicate that viewers should be worried or mistrustful about what is shown to them. Images of hypodermic needles, malformations purportedly caused by vaccines, or forced vaccinations are depicted in ways that evoke fear and/or disgust.
13. People are Saying
This strategy states or implies that “many” people feel a certain way, evoking a social norm against vaccination. The strategy depicts those who agree with the speaker as good people, and those who disagree as fearful conformists. It may imply that evidence exists simply because other people are allegedly saying it, even though there is no actual evidence presented. Otherwise, it may rely on testimonies, first-hand accounts that usually emphasize emotion over facts, and may or may not actually be true.
14. Question Begging
A technique that poses questions designed to set up a narrative, as opposed to asking questions for objective journalistic purposes. This strategy asks a series of questions that lead to a specific anti-vaccine answer, while framing the conversation as objective and inquisitive.
15. Think of the Children!
This rhetoric suggests that anti-vaccine advocacy is not about what activists want for themselves, but rather what is best for children. Arguments are framed so as to position children’s exaggerated physical vulnerability and moral purity as the decisive factor in assessing risk. It often uses emotionally affecting (manipulative) images of cute children.
16. Trappings of Authority
Often a visual rhetoric, this strategy uses symbols of authority and expertise to give added weight to an argument. A speaker might be in an office full of books. They might be in a doctor’s office. They might be expensively dressed. The interviewer or director might refer to them with exaggerated deference. Sometimes, their credentials are presented as if they were very impressive but, when examined more closely, are spurious or over-inflated.