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

Manuel Serrano-Alarcon, Martin Mckee, Yuxi Wang, Alexander Kentikelenis and David Stuckler

No cvq78, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

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.

Date: 2022-04-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-hea and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:cvq78

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/cvq78

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