Here as elsewhere, individuals who hesitate to roll up their sleeves to get vaccinated or who refuse to do so are blamed. But wouldn’t certain political and scientific elites also have a share of responsibility in this resistance? The erosion of the bond of trust in the ruling class was palpable long before March 2020. And this distrust has sometimes historically been fueled by certain gestures made by governments or members of the scientific community.
At the end of November in Guadeloupe, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, made the following observation: “there is a very explosive situation, linked to a very local context, to tensions that we know and which are historic”. The archipelago was at that time shaken by an explosion of anger linked to the obligation to vaccinate against COVID-19 for health personnel. This “local” and “historical” context evoked by Macron? The chlordecone scandal which contaminated almost all of this French overseas territory.
From 1972 to 1993, this ultra-toxic pesticide was used in the banana plantations of Guadeloupe and Martinique to fight against the banana weevil, an insect that ravaged the plantations. According to a study by Public Health France, 95% of the inhabitants of Guadeloupe and 92% of the residents of Martinique are today contaminated by this endocrine disruptor which is believed to be the cause of many health problems, including cancers.
“We have already been fooled with chlordecone, it will not happen a second time with the vaccine”, summed up a thirty-year-old living in Fort-de-France in Martinique at the end of December to a journalist from the Figaro. A loss of confidence in the elites, therefore, which has nothing to do with COVID-19, but which federates fears and suspicions towards the ruling class.
“There are collective past experiences, which can be linked to colonial, white, biomedical oppression, whose criticism and opposition manifests itself in the refusal of vaccination – even if this oppression is not necessarily historically linked to vaccination”, analyzes historian Laurence Monnais, who specializes in issues related to vaccination.
This phenomenon has been observed in other vaccination campaigns, including that against poliomyelitis conducted by the United States in Afghanistan, underlines the professor from the University of Montreal. A campaign that had slipped into episodes of violence going as far as the kidnapping of vaccinators.
In this case as in others, “it is not vaccination as such that is frightening, but rather a symbol that refers to a colonial experience or an experience of domination [avec laquelle une population veut rompre] », explains Laurence Monnais.
Medical experiments
Elsewhere in the world, it is directly the trust in Western medicine and pharmaceutical companies that has been damaged following episodes where clinical trials have been carried out on populations who have not given their free and informed consent.
One thinks in particular of the trials of the antiretroviral drug tenofovir carried out by the Gilead laboratory on prostitutes in Cameroon in the 2000s or the tests of the antibiotic Trovan to combat bacterial meningitis carried out by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer on children in Nigeria during the previous decade. A scandal that later led to the compensation of families by the pharmaceutical giant.
According to François Audet, director of the Canadian Observatory on Crises and Humanitarian Action and professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal, the fact of having been used as guinea pigs “during episodes that are well documented” still remains today in the minds of many communities in some parts of the world.
You have to reach out [aux non-vaccinés], and not build a wall that will create even more divisions […]
“The consequence of this type of deplorable, and even criminal, approach is also the loss of confidence and mistrust in the elites, in science and also in the Western dimension of the quick fix that is being suggested to them today” , he points out.
Plurality of reasons
Since “Canada is made up of people who come from all over the planet”, as François Audet mentions, these collective traumas have repercussions right here at home. The CoVivre program of the Sherpa University Institute, which works to reduce health inequalities in Quebec exacerbated by COVID-19, has also produced a guide aimed at demystifying vaccine hesitancy in the province.
This document dissects the relationship to vaccination that various ethnocultural communities maintain, while analyzing the plurality of reasons that can lead to the decision not to be vaccinated. “Right now, we want to blame a group [les non-vaccinés] which does not exist and which is very heterogeneous, mentions the historian Laurence Monnais, who participated in the drafting of this guide. We always hit the same [les non-vaccinés] by confusing the refusal of vaccination, the hesitation to vaccinate and the non-vaccination [pour des raisons d’accessibilité ou de trauma collectif par exemple]. »
Innu surgeon Stanley Vollant recalls that Aboriginal communities have also suffered from this erosion of the bond of trust in the ruling class. “There is a historical obstacle [à la vaccination] associated with white colonialism, he observes. And there are people [dans les communautés autochtones] who remember that Aboriginal people were part of medical experiments in the 1950s and 1960s. »
Transfer of prevention to individuals
In Quebec, the state’s disengagement from the public health sector may also have fueled a certain reluctance towards vaccination, believes Laurence Monnais. “If we were more aware collectively of what public health is for and if this public health was better funded, we might have less criticism,” she drops.
Especially since, since the 1970s, the state has transferred the aspect of prevention to individuals, notes the historian. “We were made to understand [à partir de cette époque] that our health is up to us to take care of it: we have to eat well, don’t smoke, don’t drink a lot, exercise, she stresses. This had the unexpected effect, or perverse according to some, that we also took charge of other preventive measures and that we claimed the right to choose to be vaccinated or not, or even to be vaccinated against some diseases and not others. »
For François Audet, it is time to leave more room in the public debate for other disciplines, such as ethics, sociology or anthropology alongside epidemiology and pharmacology, for example, in order to restore a certain dialogue and to ease the tensions in our societies. “We need to reach out, not build a wall that will create even more divisions and loss of faith in elites and democracy in the future. »
With Isabelle Porter