In this article I discuss the definition of “the Antivaccine Movement” using the case of the French controversy over the safety of the 2009 pandemic flu vaccine. I show that the group of main actors ...who criticized the vaccine’s safety is heterogeneous. This heterogeneity can be found in the type of arguments mobilized to question the vaccine’s safety and in these actors’ likelihood of being involved in any vaccine-related controversies. I show that only a minority of these actors rejected vaccination in general and mobilized against all vaccination campaigns. Most of these actors only occasionally mobilized against a given vaccine or vaccination campaign and they did so to promote a political or cultural agenda that went beyond the vaccine itself. Using these results, I argue that in order to better understand how vaccine-related controversies emerge and why some activists devote time and resources to spread vaccine-critical arguments, social scientists should use three distinct concepts to refer to vaccine criticism: The Antivaccine Movement, the Marginally Antivaccine Movements and the Occasionally Vaccine Critical Movements. To do so would enable social scientists and public health experts to better understand the different ways in which vaccination can become politicized and the evolution of this politicization.
•The concept of “the Antivaccine Movement” (AV) is rarely precisely defined.•The AV is only one of many social movements involved in vaccine criticism.•French vaccine critics disagree fundamentally and many do not reject all vaccines.•To focus on these differences helps understand how vaccines are politicized.•Mobilizations can be systematic vs occasional; and target all vs some vaccines.
The social profile of reluctant responders is even more worrying: this attitude was more prevalent among low-income people (37%), who are generally more exposed to infectious diseases,4 among young ...women (aged 18–35 years; 36%), who play a crucial role regarding childhood vaccination,5 and among people aged older than 75 years (22%), who are probably at an increased risk for severe illness from COVID-19. When this dimension has been studied, researchers have often found a connection between political beliefs and attitudes to vaccines.6 They highlight a crucial issue for public health interventions: how can we assure the public that recommendations reflect the state of scientific knowledge rather than political interests? Public authorities are setting up fast-track approval processes for a putative vaccine against SARS-CoV-2.9 It is crucial to communicate early and transparently on these processes to avoid vaccines becoming part of political debates.
An often-stated public health comment is that "vaccination is a victim of its own success." While the scientific and medical consensus on the benefits of vaccination is clear and unambiguous, an ...increasing number of people are perceiving vaccines as unsafe and unnecessary. The World Health Organization identified "the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite availability of vaccines" as one of the 10 threats to global health in 2019. The negative influence of anti-vaccination movements is often named as a cause of increasing vaccine resistance in the public. In this review, we give an overview of the current literature on the topic, beginning by agreeing on terminology and concepts before looking at potential causes, consequences, and impacts of resistance to vaccination.
•8 more vaccines have been mandatory in France, bringing the total to 11.•We describe how vaccines became contentious in France in the past 20 years.•The 2016 citizen consultation on vaccination led ...to the extension of mandates.
France is one of the countries with the highest prevalence of vaccine hesitancy in the world. In an attempt to raise vaccination coverages, the French government made on January 1, 2018 eight more vaccines mandatory in addition to the three required until then. The process that led to this policy choice is of particular interest. We describe how vaccines became contentious in France and how French authorities came to view mandatory vaccination as the solution to the rise in vaccine hesitancy. In a bold move, French public health authorities turned to a new type of institutional device grounded in the ideal of democracy and public participation to political decision-making: “a citizen consultation”. This consultation anchored the idea that legal coercion could be the solution to France’s crisis with vaccines. Time will tell whether the French extension of mandatory vaccination will reduce tensions around vaccines.
Airway hyperresponsiveness and inflammation are fundamental hallmarks of allergic asthma that are accompanied by increases in certain polycations, such as eosinophil cationic protein. Levels of these ...cations in body fluids correlate with asthma severity. We show that polycations and elevated extracellular calcium activate the human recombinant and native calcium-sensing receptor (CaSR), leading to intracellular calcium mobilization, cyclic adenosine monophosphate breakdown, and p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase phosphorylation in airway smooth muscle (ASM) cells. These effects can be prevented by CaSR antagonists, termed calcilytics. Moreover, asthmatic patients and allergen-sensitized mice expressed more CaSR in ASMs than did their healthy counterparts. Indeed, polycations induced hyperreactivity in mouse bronchi, and this effect was prevented by calcilytics and absent in mice with CaSR ablation from ASM. Calcilytics also reduced airway hyperresponsiveness and inflammation in allergen-sensitized mice in vivo. These data show that a functional CaSR is up-regulated in asthmatic ASM and targeted by locally produced polycations to induce hyperresponsiveness and inflammation. Thus, calcilytics may represent effective asthma therapeutics.
When the threat of COVID-19 became widely acknowledged, many hoped that this pandemic would squash “the anti-vaccine movement”. However, when vaccines started arriving in rich countries at the end of ...2020, it appeared that vaccine hesitancy might be an issue even in the context of this major pandemic. Does it mean that the mobilization of vaccine-critical activists on social media is one of the main causes of this reticence to vaccinate against COVID-19? In this paper, we wish to contribute to current work on vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 pandemic by looking at one of the many mechanisms which can cause reticence towards vaccines: the capacity of vaccine-critical activists to influence a wider public on social media. We analyze the evolution of debates over the COVID-19 vaccine on the French Twittosphere, during two first years of the pandemic, with a particular attention to the spreading capacity of vaccine-critical websites. We address two main questions: 1) Did vaccine-critical contents gain ground during this period? 2) Who were the main actors in the diffusion of these contents? While debates over vaccines experienced a tremendous surge during this period, the share of vaccine-critical contents in these debates remains stable except for a limited number of short periods associated with specific events. Secondly, analyzing the community structure of the re-tweets hyper-graph, we reconstruct the mesoscale structure of the information flows, identifying and characterizing the major communities of users. We analyze their role in the information ecosystem: the largest right-wing community has a typical echo-chamber behavior collecting all the vaccine-critical tweets from outside and recirculating it inside the community. The smaller left-wing community is less permeable to vaccine-critical contents but, has a large capacity to spread it once adopted.
Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are continuously generated in vascular tissues by various oxidoreductase enzymes. They contribute to normal cell signaling, and modulate vascular smooth muscle tone and ...endothelial permeability in response to physiological agonists and to various cellular stresses and environmental factors, such as hypoxia. While concentrations of ROS are normally tightly controlled by cellular redox buffer systems, if produced in excess they may contribute to vascular disease. Protein kinases are essential components of most cell signaling pathways, including those involving ROS. The functioning of several members of this highly diverse group of enzymes, which include receptor and nonreceptor tyrosine kinases, protein kinase C, mitogen-activated kinases, and Rho-kinase, are modified by ROS, either through direct oxidative modification or indirectly through modification of associated proteins such as tyrosine phosphatases and monomeric G proteins. In this review, we discuss the molecular mechanisms of redox modification of these proteins, the downstream pathways affected, the often complex interaction between major kinase pathways, and feedback to ROS production itself. We also discuss complicating factors such as differential actions of superoxide anion and hydrogen peroxide, questions concerning concentration dependence, and the significance of signaling microdomains.
Reaching the last pockets of unvaccinated people is challenging, and has led to the consideration of mandatory vaccination for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Our aim was to assess attitudes ...toward mandatory COVID-19 vaccination in France before the announcement of—and factors associated with opposition to—this type of policy.
Between the 10th and 23rd May 2021, we conducted a cross-sectional online survey among a representative sample of the French population aged 18 and over, and a specific sample of the French senior population aged over 65.
Among 3056 respondents, 1314 (43.0%) were in favour of mandatory COVID-19 vaccination, 1281 (41.9%) were opposed to such a policy, and 461 (15.1%) were undecided. Among opponents to mandatory COVID-19 vaccination for the general population, 385 (30.05%) were in favour of mandatory COVID-19 vaccination for healthcare workers (HCWs). In multivariate analysis, the age groups 18–24 and 25–34 years were significantly more opposed than the reference group (>75 years old) with respective adjusted odds ratio (aOR) and 95% confidence interval (95%CI) 4.67 (1.73–12.61) and 3.74 (1.57–8.93). Having no intention of getting COVID-19 vaccination was strongly associated with opposition to mandatory vaccination (aOR 10.67, 95%CI 6.41–17.76). In comparison with partisans of the centre, partisans of the far left and green parties were more likely to be opposed to mandatory COVID-19 vaccine, with respective aORs (95%CI) of 1.89 (1.06–3.38) and 2.08 (1.14–3.81).
Attitudes toward mandatory COVID-19 vaccination are split in the French general population, and the debate might become politicized.
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