La salud en disputala dimensión sociopolítica y comunicacional de las controversias sobre vacunas en Chile

Abstract

In recent years, vaccine controversies have gained international visibility, and this was especially the case for Chile, where public debates and the refusal of parents to vaccinate their children have increased. The most notable controversies include the 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza vaccine; the dispute over the thimerosal law, which sought to ban this preservative from vaccines because of its possible association with autism; or the most recent opposition to The Human Papillomavirus Vaccine. Studies on "anti-vaccination" generally focus on the arguments of those who reject this measure without problematizing the role of other actors, such as the health experts (Chatterjee, 2013, Cuesta & Gaspar, 2014, Gómez Marco & Zamanillo Rojo, 2005; Wolfe, Sharp, & Lipsky, 2002). In general, these studies’ assumptions derive from traditional visions of science, which have permeated much of public health and the medicine structuring their discourses around the science/belief axis or its derivations, such as, knowledge/ignorance, reason/emotions. The problem with this discourse is that it does not enable to understand the complexity of the views from parents who reject vaccination, excluding them from the discussion thus reserved for experts. This also has implications for the field of communication, since attributing the problem of vaccination rejection to ignorance or lack of understanding of scientific information leads to focus on the type of solutions oriented to overcome what is known as "cognitive deficit" through communicational and educational campaigns. Thus, this perspective attributes to the communicator the role of "disseminator" of scientific knowledge, which works from "top to bottom" or from "expert to lay knowledge" while delimiting not only the contents, but also the definition of the legitimate actors to convey, transmit, and receive the information...