Vaccine Nationalism or ‘Brexit Dividend’? Strategies of Legitimation in the EU-UK Post-Brexit Debate on COVID-19 Vaccination Campaigns

Abstract

The initial stage of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout has been slow-moving and marred by supply disruptions in the EU. These problems have triggered severe criticism toward the institutions and highlighted a stark contrast compared to Britain’s vaccination campaign, which, at the beginning of 2021, was one of the fastest in the continent. In the ensuing debate between the EU and the UK on their uneven vaccination rates, the Brexit argument has been repeatedly invoked: Some political commentators have argued that the reason why COVID-19 vaccination campaign could run so smoothly in Britain is that the country was not held back by the EU’s slow approval process. This paper observes the way in which Britain emphasized its blistering vaccination pace to deflect criticism against Brexit. From a discursive perspective, Britain’s vaccine success was used to vindicate the Brexit project, providing a new argument in favour of its indispensable and timely nature. At the other end of a binary rhetoric, the EU officials attempted to shatter confidence in the ‘British vaccine’, while also depositing blame on other factors triggering the EU’s delay, such as the shortage of pharmaceutical supplies. The analytical part of this paper foregrounds strategies of discursive legitimation to observe how, and to what extent, the Brexit debate is being reshaped in UK and EU media by looking at a corpus of political tweets. The rhetorical strategies adopted by UK political leaders and EU officials to (de)legitimise national and supranational choices with reference to the COVID-19 vaccination campaign are observed through the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis as it embraces the idea that discursive acts are in dialectical relation to the social and institutional structures in which they are framed.