‘They Hid Our Palliatives and Now They Want to give us Vaccine’: Recontextualizations of COVID-19 Facebook Vaccination Discourses of Nigeria Centre for Disease Control

Abstract

This study deployed Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) to investigate four (4) Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (hereafter, NCDC) COVID-19 vaccination updates and two hundred (200) ensuing reactions among Nigerian Facebook users. The study intends to ascertain how such reactions reflected the socio-political context and the intertexts in which the COVID-19 vaccination was embedded and how it affected the vaccine's receptiveness in Nigeria. NCDC was established in the year 2011 as a government health agency that deals with the outbreak of infectious diseases. The findings of the study revealed that NCDC ideologically framed itself as health experts, solution providers and health interventionists via the use of nomination strategies, such as proper nouns, dietic and professional anthroponyms, which are meant to trigger optimism among Nigerians. However, reactions to the COVID-19 updates have been re-contextualized to capture the socio-political intertexts at the time, which have affected the inoculation exercise. Respondents negatively framed the Nigerian government as the main social actors, engaging dialectic and phoric expressions as out-group markers, tropes such as metaphors and similes, among others, as topos for rejecting the vaccine. The study argues that COVID-19 vaccination reluctance and abstinence by Nigerians were largely informed by presupposed socio-historic and socio-cognitive factors, such as topos of corruption and distrust of government (35%), bad governance and demand for responsible government (15.5%) among other factors which are forms of protest for the civic rights of the people.