Abstract

This article studies the public alarm surrounding the No-Vax phenomenon from the perspective of Stanley Cohen’s sociology of moral panic, trying to conceptualize it as the result of complex media and editorial practices of news production. In this context, making use of a discourse analysis approach, we’ll focus on “la Repubblicaµ editorials, shedding light on the complex repertoire of images and representations deployed by the newspaper and the way it has shaped a stressful and frightful account of the anti-vaccination phenomenon, giving a picture that over-represent its actual extent and the consensus by which it is surrounded in the public sphere. In doing so, we’ll show how the news production dynamic promote a dichotomic and divisive narrative of the pandemic, in which any critical attempt to question the modus operandi of the governance of the COVID-19 global health crisis is labelled as an expression of conspiracism and antiscientific scepticism.