“You can be whatever you want in this world, but not un-vaccinated.” – Understanding Covid-19 anti-vaccinators in Modern Democracy

Abstract

Sweden’s approach for covid-19 has been considered mild compared to other countries’, but despite the Public Health Authority’s, the government’s, and the politician’s relatively relaxed l approach towards the pandemic, there have been a lot of questions raised regarding the work and management of this crisis both from those that asked for a firmer handling and from those who criticised the regulations all together. There are citizens in Sweden who have had a growing resentment towards the vaccination and the vaccination card, which has come to result in people connecting and establishing movements against the covid-19 vaccination through protests and demonstrations. This study will investigate the growing resistance against the covid-19 vaccination in Sweden through both participation observations and interviews. The thesis is based on a total of six interviews with seven participants, which is complemented with two observations that were made in Gothenburg and Malmö, both in the year of 2021. To be able to act in public is a fundamental part of democracy, since it allows citizens to use their political voice, and this thesis wanted to develop knowledge on who the people demonstrating are, as well as their motivations. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to investigate personal and political motivation among people who have chosen to participate in the demonstrations against vaccinations. The object is to create a further understanding of why people oppose vaccination and how to make sense of it in modern democracy and society. Through the work of Hannah Arendt, Eric Voegelin, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau the material will be analysed and discussed to explore the different ideas and rationale the participants articulated against vaccination. From the data collected three main perspectives were found. First, the participants own perspectives on their activism, secondly the Medical Perspectives, and lastly Social-Political Perspectives. Issues concerning trust, freedom, and truth, have become central in understanding why people protests against vaccination, and it has become clear that regardless of who the actor is, the question regarding vaccination relates to power and how we as individuals make sense of different power dynamics.