A jab is not a vaccine; it's a ‘shot’

Objectives

Previous work identified a new type of vaccine scepticism on social media centred around questioning the status of the COVID-19 vaccine as a vaccine, partly by contrasting ‘vaccine’ with ‘shot’. This study aimed to investigate whether this scepticism also manifests with a contrast between ‘vaccine’ and ‘jab’, a term more commonly used in parts of the United Kingdom.

Study design

Corpus-based discourse analysis.

Methods

Using a corpus of 261,203 tweets focused on the MMR vaccine, we used collocations and concordancing to identify instances of ‘jab’ and its variants that co-occurred with references to COVID-19. We qualitatively examined 50 % of the relevant tweets (n = 319) to identify any that undermined the status of the COVID-19 vaccines as vaccines.

Results

18 % (n = 59) of the examined tweets used ‘jab’ to undermine the status of the COVID-19 vaccine as a vaccine. A ‘jab’ was seen as inferior to a ‘vaccine’ on the basis that it did not prevent infection. Although this contrast mostly focused on the COVID-19 vaccine, some tweets also referenced the flu vaccine as another example that is therefore not a vaccine.

Conclusions

Our analysis showed that ‘jab’ and its variants are seen to indicate an intervention that is inferior to vaccination, similarly to ‘shot’ in previous work. This evidence suggests that ‘jab’ and its variants are best avoided in public health campaigns designed to encourage uptake of vaccinations in the UK.