Centre for the Study of Health, Ethics, and Society
Publication: Imagined Immune Communities. Historical Legacies and National Semantics of Health and Society in French and German Covid-19 Vaccination Propaganda Videos
14 October 2025
Photo: Ministère de la Santé et de la Prévention, 'À chaque vaccination, c'est la vie qui reprend', YouTube, 14 June 2021. Screenshot reproduced under citation right for the purpose of scholarly analysis. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7HONnjrqQA].
Written by Peter Banks and Tobias Becker
In spring 2021, vaccines against Covid-19 became available in many countries and subsequently led governments to issue various public health campaigns that painted bright and hopeful pictures of recovering a pre-pandemic social life. This article takes a French campaign video from June 2021 and a German one from July 2021 as examples for a comparative analysis of this kind of Covid-19 vaccination propaganda. Combining a qualitative media studies perspective with insights from the history of medicine, such an interdisciplinary approach reveals how the videos reflect distinct formations of cultural knowledge and social histories of vaccination in France and Germany. Drawing on Benedict Anderson, the article proposes the concept of ‘imagined immune communities’ to capture the different attempts to establish forms of solidarity that are based on influential historical legacies and cultural value orders. The findings show how public health campaigns on Covid-19 vaccination persuasively instrumentalised cultural and national semantics of health and society, and how they were likewise shaped by the distinct social histories of vaccination in the two countries.
