Is France a land populated by die-hard antivaxers? Are the French more hostile to vaccination than the other peoples of Europe, or even the world? International surveys often answer in the affirmative. In 2018, on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic, they thus made France one of the world champions of mistrust: the proportion of respondents believing that vaccines were not safe there was much greater than in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, India or Brazil.
However, this skepticism does not seem to keep the French away from vaccination: citizens who are resistant to any vaccine constitute a tiny minority (around 2%), and France is one of the countries where vaccination coverage against Covid-19 is the lowest. higher. To understand this enigma, sociologist Jeremy Ward, researcher at Inserm, explored, in a work carried out for the Foundation for the Social Sciences, the multiple facets of French vaccine culture, which, according to him, falls under the hesitation more than rejection.
Unlike Great Britain, in the United States or in Brazil, France did not experience major movements in opposition to vaccination before the mobilization against the hepatitis B vaccine, accused, at the end of the 1990s, of causing multiple sclerosis . The climate changed in the years that followed: vaccine doubt suddenly increased during the H1N1 influenza pandemic (2009), then during health controversies over aluminum-based adjuvants (2010), the dangers of vaccines against papillomavirus (2011) or the use of multivalent vaccines (from 2014).
Distrust of institutions
If these movements are extremely severe towards certain vaccines, they are however careful not to make common cause with traditional antivaccinalism. “Those involved in these controversies criticize certain substances but they do not attack the very principle of vaccination, emphasizes Jeremy Ward. Surveys from the 2010s show not a general rejection of vaccines, but a targeted reluctance towards some of them – especially against hepatitis B and human papillomavirus. The number of French people who say they reject all vaccines is both very low and very stable over time – around 2%. ”
This variable-geometry mistrust remained the rule during the Covid-19 pandemic. “The share of French people intending to be vaccinated rose from 75% in April 2020 to 45% in December 2020 to rise to almost 80% during the summer of 2021, Jeremy Ward continues. If the fluctuations are spectacular, it is because vaccine refusal does not depend only on an attitude towards “the vaccination” in general: it changes according to the political climate and, above all, to the state of scientific knowledge. From their introduction, messenger RNA vaccines like that of Pfizer have thus benefited from a much more favorable judgment than that of AstraZeneca. ”
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