Argumentative pro-vaccination and anti-vaccination narratives in the MMR vaccine-autism controversy

This paper presents a discourse analysis of the public’s response to UK press coverage of the debate surrounding the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and its alleged link to autism from 1998 to 2019. The analysis focuses on published readers’ letters to the editor in a newspaper corpus comprising 12 national British newspapers, and on comments posted by users on the Guardian’s and the Daily Mail’s Facebook pages. These social media pages are dialogic sites of individual participation that allow users to discuss how the latest events and debates affect their daily lives, as well as how they interpret them through their own ideological, cultural, social and personal lenses. The findings show that medico-scientific issues such as vaccination are often personalised by the parents and legal guardians of young children, and that they regard individual experiences with vaccination or with vaccine-preventable diseases as valid evidence on which to base their argumentation. The findings thus highlight the need to devise effective communication to foster the science of vaccines and to counter vaccine hesitancy without belittling a person’s genuine experiences and sincere beliefs.