'It has long been recognised that attitudes towards vaccines may be vaccine-specific, so that people may take up some, but not others', Elena Semino, Distinguished Professor in Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University writes in The Conversation. In this article she explores scepticism of the COVID-19 vaccine. She suggests that 'the use of informal alternatives to the term “vaccine”, such as “shot”, in public health messaging may unintentionally contribute to this confusion about what counts as a vaccine.

On July 26 2021, the following statement was posted on Twitter (later renamed X) about the COVID-19 vaccine:

My colleagues and I came across this comment and many like it while analysing a nine-million-word dataset consisting of tweets about the COVID and MMR vaccines posted between 2008 and 2022, to learn more about vaccine scepticism. We discovered that the author of this tweet is not alone in questioning the status of the COVID-19 vaccines as vaccines, and comparing it to others.'

Read the full article here: ‘It’s not a vaccine, it’s a shot’: uncovering a new trend in vaccine scepticism