Populism and Resistance to Science: Assessing Antivaccine Sentiments in Chile During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Skepticism and resistance towards vaccines have been reported worldwide in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. During the restrictions on public gatherings, these attitudes were mostly voiced on social media, providing a vast digital record for examining their motivations. This paper systematizes the antivaccine arguments in Chilean Twitter (now called X) interactions over six months in 2021, in which the country achieved its highest COVID-19 vaccination rates, analyzing 72,441 tweets from 20,293 different accounts. We connect these arguments to recent work in political theory that categorizes the populist criticism of science into three types of objections: a moral, a democratic, and an epistemic objection. We find that all three are clearly identifiable in the data, in somewhat similar proportion: some denounced the vaccination scheme as a conspiracy led by selfish global elites (moral); others complained that the authorities, following scientific advice but with no democratic warrant, were taking away their freedoms (democratic); and yet others pointed to a broad distrust of the scientific procedure in which the vaccine was developed, trusting instead their personal opinions and anecdotal evidence (epistemic). We also characterize the posting and interaction rates of the accounts that use these objections, and whether they switch between them.