Vaccines don’t make your baby autistic: arguing in favour of vaccines in institutional healthcare communication

This paper intends to explore argumentation as employed in institutional healthcare communication supranationally and in different developed countries to respond to distrust in vaccines as supported and spread by non-institutional sources like anti-vaccine movements. A corpus of institutional publications belonging to different genres are analysed from a critical discourse analysis perspective for: a) specific argumentative strategies employed to promote child immunisation;b) their linguistic realisation; c) their rhetorical relationship with anti-vaccination sources; d) their ethical aspects