Vaccines and Their Metaphors: From Memories to Monsters in the Age of Misinformation

What do memories, raincoats, and snakes have in common? They have all been used as metaphors for vaccines by people with different views and communicative goals. This book explores how, why, and with what potential consequences metaphors shape vaccine communication across diverse voices – including scientists, politicians, parents writing online, and celebrity anti-vaxxers – and contexts, from popular science books and social media to government press conferences, online animations for children, and public health campaigns.Drawing examples from the UK, Italy, Pakistan, Australia, and the USA, each chapter examines specific communication types, revealing how metaphors achieve varied goals. For example, the COVID-19 vaccine development has been described as “safe as a restaurant serving multiple courses simultaneously”. In contrast, others have used metaphors to fuel conspiracy theories, portraying vaccines as weapons in a sinister battle against ordinary people. The book demonstrates that metaphors are central and inescapable in vaccine discourse, equally powerful for pro-vaccination explanation and reassurance as for anti-vaccination obfuscation and fearmongering. Overall, the book shows how the use of metaphor constitutes both a challenge and an opportunity for promoting vaccines as a public health intervention. This text is the first comprehensive account of vaccine metaphors drawing from diverse sources, contexts, and countries, examining both pro- and anti-vaccination perspectives. It is written in an accessible style for anyone interested in understanding how language shapes our perceptions of vaccines and public health. This is vital reading for students and researchers of language and health communication, applied linguistics, medical humanities, discourse analysis, and metaphor studies.

About the Author

Elena Semino is Distinguished Professor in Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, and Co-director of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science. She holds a Visiting Adjunct Professorship at the City University of Hong Kong. She is co-author of the following Routledge titles: Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life (2018), Researching Language and Health (2023), and HPV Vaccination Discourse Online (2026).