Vaccinated But Unconvinced: How the Government, Science and People Are Locked in a Cycle of Distrust

The Wire

5 hours ago

Rishabh Kachroo
2 minutes ago
We cannot vaccinate our way out of a trust crisis. Nor can we flatten public health into dashboards and coverage stats while pretending the politics of access and education has vanished.
climbing. News tickers lit up and dashboards turned red as a familiar sense of unease appeared to creep back in.
Based on recent news reports and the official numbers by the Indian government's Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), there appears to be a decline in COVID-19 case numbers across India. However, what continues to persist is a pervasive scepticism toward biomedical authority, fragmentation of consensus around scientific expertise, and the entrenchment of anti-vax sentiments and vaccine hesitancy.
Even as governments around the world declared COVID-19 endemic, even as lockdowns lifted and masks came off, something more enduring continued to ferment in the background – a growing weariness of science, a breakdown of trust in public health, and a gnawing doubt about the very tools we had hailed as our way out. This is the challenge we face – not just a post-pandemic world, but a post-trust one.
Globally, the script is more explicit: in the United States, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services and one of the most prominent anti-vax figures today, has declared that COVID vaccines have been taken off from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's immunisation schedule for healthy children and pregnant women. The announcement, met with cheers by vaccine skeptics and concern by medical professionals, reveals the deep cracks in the scientific consensus around immunisation. It is not just an electoral tactic or a fringe opinion anymore. It signals a mainstreaming of anti-vaccine rhetoric at the highest levels of political discourse.
But these fissures are not new, and neither are they limited to one man or one country. In India, beneath the headlines of successful campaigns and world-record vaccination days, a quieter storm has been brewing – of doubt, suspicion, and resistance. Vaccine hesitancy, and in some cases outright refusal, has taken root. In WhatsApp forwards, family WhatsApp groups, tea-shop conversations, and local news reports, one hears echoes of doubt: 'Do we really need this booster?', 'Is this safe for my child?', 'Why are they pushing this so hard?'
These questions are not always born out of ignorance. More often, they are the product of an exhausted public grappling with contradictory signals, opaque communication from authorities, and a long history of being unwitting recipients of top-down public health campaigns that rarely ask the public what it wants or needs. Trust, once lost, does not return easily. And science, for all its rigour, cannot function in a vacuum of credibility.
This is not a regurgitation of a tired, old binary of science versus irrationality. Rather, it is an exploration of how vaccine hesitancy has evolved, not as a static refusal but as a moving target, deeply shaped by context, history, politics, and everyday experiences of people. In India and elsewhere, the problem is not merely that people are rejecting science, but that science is increasingly being delivered in ways that feel distant, imposed, and unaccountable.
To understand the present moment, this curious mix of resurgence and resistance, we must go back to the discourses that shaped the pandemic response, the silences that accompanied the celebration of 'vaccine success,' and the publics that have emerged not in compliance but in contestation. The term 'publics' is used here to highlight the plurality of ways in which the public encounters and interprets social or political issues. This framing recognises the contingent, emergent, and often contested nature of public formations.
After the applause: participation without consent
The story of India's COVID-19 vaccination campaign was described as one of scale, speed, and success.
Banners heralded record-breaking milestones. Politicians congratulated citizens for their scientific temper. Policymakers celebrated India's digital vaccine infrastructure as a model for the world. And in many ways, the achievement was real – about a billion vaccinated, hospitals (eventually) decongested, fatalities reduced. But beneath the surface of this triumphant narrative lay a quieter, more ambivalent reality: one where public participation often took the form of performance, compliance was sometimes coerced, and consent was rarely truly informed.
In the early phases of the vaccine rollout, there was little room for hesitation. Questions about side-effects, safety, or the speed of development were brushed aside as dangerous distractions. Public health messaging became less about dialogue and more about discipline. 'Trust the science' became a mantra, even when science itself was still catching up. There was little space to acknowledge uncertainty. Let alone the legitimacy of public anxiety.
The state, instead of cultivating a robust and deliberative relationship with its publics, opted for a spectacle. Its co-option of the media machinery meant that vaccination drives were live-streamed and broadcasted. Frontline workers were photographed mid-injection. Local officials competed to vaccinate the highest numbers. And when uptake dipped, pressure replaced persuasion: incentives in some areas, threats in others. In parts of Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, reports surfaced of villagers being denied ration entitlements unless they got vaccinated. In Delhi, there were cases where employees were told they could not return to work without their vaccination certificate. In Assam, there were murmurs of the government withholding salaries of employees who would not get vaccinated. This was participation, but it was not consent. It was obedience secured under conditions that offered little choice. It was forced. People may line up, get vaccinated, carry their certificates, and still remain unconvinced. Without genuine engagement, participation becomes ritualistic, even resentful.
Many complied because there was fear of losing jobs, of losing access to mobility, and losing access to essential services. Some took the vaccine but remained skeptical – their concerns never fully addressed. Others kept their doubts to themselves, knowing there was no space to voice them without being labelled unscientific or irresponsible. The vaccine drive became a site where publics were expected to act, but not speak.
This silencing was not new. It followed a pattern long observed in India's public health campaigns: assume the public knows little, give them information rather than conversation, measure success in numbers rather than trust, and deem any resistance from the public as deviant behaviour. The COVID pandemic exposed how fragile that approach can be. Because once the immediate fear of infection receded, so did the willingness to comply. Boosters were ignored. And when new variants emerged, the state found itself trying to rally a public that no longer felt seen or heard.
To be abundantly clear, this is not an argument against the vaccine – it is an argument for a better relationship between science and society. This relationship should not frame the act of taking vaccine as a patriotic duty or deem it a metric of modernity. Instead, it ought to be grounded in mutual trust and open communication. Where publics are invited into the process not as passive beneficiaries, but as interlocutors with valid questions. Questions that may very well inform the scientific method!
In this light, the global rise of vaccine hesitancy and anti-vax sentiment is not simply a backlash. It is a consequence. It is not an issue in itself which ought to be resolved, but merely points to the larger questions at play. It reflects the consequences of how public health was imagined and enacted – who got to speak, who was listened to, and who was merely expected to follow orders. The applause for India's vaccine success drowned out many such voices. Now, as the applause fades, we are left with their questions.
If public health has to truly mean something in a democratic society, it must start from a different place, a different vision, a different set of tools, and an entirely different mindset. Not with targets or dashboards, but with conversations. We cannot continue to manage publics as data points. They are political subjects with memories, emotions, and stakes in how science enters their lives. Participation without consent is not public health. It is just policy in a hurry.
Public health has always been a site of negotiation. Between the state and its citizens, between scientific authority and local knowledge, between global standards and domestic realities. The vaccine, thus, is not just a biomedical object. It is a symbol of governance, modernity, state care, and sometimes, state violence. This is why vaccine hesitancy in India cannot be explained merely through the lens of misinformation or lack of education. To do so would be to ignore the layers of history, class, caste, gender, and geography that shape how people engage with health interventions.
India's vaccination strategy during the COVID pandemic, though massive in scale, often reinforced these fractures. Communication was top-down and overly technical. When resistance appeared, it was often dismissed as ignorance. But resistance is a form of engagement too. The refusal to vaccinate is not always the absence of reason. Sometimes, it is reason asserting itself against a system that does not listen.
Today, as COVID cases rise and fall, we are confronted with the aftershocks of this fatigue. Experts may issue fresh advisories. But the ground has already shifted.
We must ask ourselves: What does it mean to call someone 'hesitant'? In a country where 'awareness campaigns' have often meant megaphones without conversation, it is perhaps not surprising that people tune out.
To face the next phase of the pandemic, we need more than doses and dashboards. We need humility. We need to ask different questions. And we need to recognise that the crisis of vaccine hesitancy is not about the public refusing science – it is about science forgetting the public.
It is also equally important to pause, assert, and reflect here on the fact that the rise in disinformation and misinformation has led to a genuine rise of anti-vax and vaccine hesitant sentiments which do not necessarily emerge from similar concerns or socio-political imaginaries. They are not always about a shared sense of history where such people suffered at the hands of the state or were systematically excluded by the state in governance affairs. These people or groups may very well have ulterior motives. Motives with a particular agenda in mind, a particular politics in mind, and a particular world order they wish to see. These, too, are merely symptoms of a dysfunctional state-science-public combine.
The new publics of vaccination: between contestation and care
There is a tendency in public discourse to reduce the conversation around vaccines to a binary: those who comply and those who don't. But the story unfolding today, in India and globally, is far messier. We are not facing a simple insurrection against science. What we are witnessing is the emergence of new publics: fragmented, critical, deeply shaped by lived experiences, and incredibly potent. These are publics that are not necessarily 'anti-vaccine,' but are certainly no longer content to be passive recipients of scientific authority.
For decades, vaccination campaigns in India have relied on a model of outreach that prioritises scale over dialogue. The language is often about "coverage," "target populations," and "herd immunity." Missing from this vocabulary is a more humane, dialogic notion of care – one that sees people not as bodies to be immunised but as citizens to be engaged. The post-COVID moment exposes the limits of that model.
This is where the idea of 'epistemic justice' becomes vital. Who gets to define what counts as valid knowledge? Who gets to speak in the name of science? And who is expected to listen unquestioningly? In much of the global pandemic response, science was wielded not as a space of inquiry but as a mandate. The public was not asked to participate in science; it was told to comply with it.
The irony is that the state and the scientific community have often treated this resistance as noise. It has treated it as something to be countered through 'awareness' or 'influencer campaigns.' But this noise tells us where the fault lines lie. It tells us which groups feel abandoned, unheard, or coerced. It tells us what science must confront if it wishes to be democratic.
In India, this moment is especially urgent. The country is grappling with overlapping crises, economic stress, social polarisation, environmental degradation, all of which intersect with health. Vaccination cannot be isolated from these realities. The challenge, then, is not just to fight misinformation, but to rebuild relationships. Relationships between the public and the state, between communities and health workers, between science and society. This cannot be done through press releases or public service ads alone. It requires deep, long-term engagement. It requires listening.
One promising direction is the revival of community health workers as key intermediaries. ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists), anganwadi workers, and local medical staff often possess a kind of grounded trust that national campaigns lack. Their knowledge of local languages, social dynamics, and histories of care positions them uniquely to bridge the gap between biomedical authority and community experience. But for this to work, they must be empowered, not just as deliverers of state policy but as co-creators of public health discourse.
Trust
The future of vaccination does not lie in forcing consensus. It lies in recognising pluralism. It lies in accepting that doubt is not the enemy of science, but its companion. It lies in understanding that publics are not obstacles to be overcome, but interlocutors to be engaged. And most importantly, it lies in acknowledging that trust cannot simply be restored by demanding obedience. It must be earned through accountability, humility, and care.
The question before us is not merely: 'How do we get people to take the vaccine?' The better question might be: 'What kind of scientific culture do we need to ensure people want to?'
The real story of any pandemic is shaped by how deeply we choose to listen – to fear, to fatigue, to resistance, and to the complicated publics. The booster campaign that flounders, the parent who hesitates, the worker who demands more. These are not failures of science, but symptoms of a deeper rupture: a loss of dialogue.
We cannot vaccinate our way out of a trust crisis. Nor can we flatten public health into dashboards and coverage stats while pretending the politics has vanished. If anything, the politics has returned with a vengeance. What is needed is not just another wave of advisories. It is a rethinking of what public health means in a democracy. It is time to stop treating publics as obstacles to be managed and start recognising them as co-authors of our collective health futures.
Because when the next surge comes, and it will, the real question won't be 'Do they believe in science?' but 'Does science still believe in them?'.
Rishabh Kachroo is a Ph.D. scholar at Shiv Nadar IoE deemed to be University. X: https://x.com/MBHRishabh
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