Elements of Refusal

 "The very term “vaccine hesitant” normalizes vaccination by implying that it is the endpoint at which the unvaccinated will sooner or later arrive. Most unvaccinated people I know would not describe themselves as “hesitant.” At this point, most who have resisted the social and government pressure intend to remain unvaccinated permanently. As Raelle Kaia puts it,

We don't call people who haven't gone bungee jumping "bungee hesitant" nor do we call them "anti-bungee." There is no need for a category. It's just something some people decide to do, and some people don't. So this Hegelian dialectic cleverly sets up a dynamic that implicitly assumes that the regular thing for people to do is to take a vaccine, but we need words to describe those who don't, because they're so peculiar. So just by having the words in the first place, an entire reality is created and reified about what people are supposed to do or are expected to do.

The term “vaccine hesitancy” is patronizing and presumptuous. It encodes a smug certainty that official messaging on the vaccines is reliable, that reigning medical paradigms are sound, that the knowledge medical science produces is trustworthy. Science is real! Duh."

https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/elements-of-refusal