DATA_Marton_Matura_Somogyvári_HOSGVaccinationPerformances.xlsx

Marton, Péter - Matura, Tamás - Somogyvári, Csendike: Public and/or recorded vaccinations by heads of state and government receiving their first vaccine doses against COVID-19 disease (December 2020 to July 2021). A dataset. Published: 19 January 2022. Related publication: "“Dracunculus against the dragon”: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s recorded vaccination as simultaneous enactment of foreign policy and public health" (draft)<br>The article related to this dataset (awaiting submission as of 19 January 2022) examines performativity in the recorded vaccination of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán with the Sinopharm BBIBP-CorV vaccine against COVID-19 disease in February 2021, and in public and/or recorded vaccinations by other heads of state and government. To be able to thoroughly access signals embedded in PM Orbán’s performance, we contextualise and reconstruct the process of the procurement of the Sinopharm BBIBP-CorV vaccine by Hungary, to situate the significance of this transaction — and the Prime Ministerial performance — in the context of broader Sino-Hungarian ties. We also compare PM Orbán’s vaccination with similar performances by other heads of state and government. On the basis of this, we argue that PM Orbán’s vaccination constituted, remarkably, an enactment of foreign policy (and more) as much as it was an instance of public-health-related messaging. This explains some of the peculiar aspects of the way PM Orbán’s vaccination was recorded and presented to the public, deviating from the emerging consensus norms of public vaccination by heads of state and government. As such, the case constitutes an intriguing example of a “demand-driven” manifestation of Chinese influence in Hungary.<br>To compare PM Viktor Orbán’s recorded vaccination with public or recorded vaccination by other heads of state or government and other key health officials, we reviewed 30-plus performances by relevant leaders and officials. We originally intended to review performances by leaders of European Union countries, but the search was eventually expanded to beyond the EU to identify more examples of performances in particular for the months of January-February, which may have affected PM Orbán’s performance due to chronology and proximity in time. We also expanded the search beyond heads of state and government in some cases to capture in our sample more of the highly salient and, to some extent, norm-setting early vaccinations (such as Dr. Anthony Fauci’s vaccination in the U.S.). We have also found and included in our data „non-performances”, i.e., where only social media announcements were made by certain leaders, albeit these do not fully lack either a performative or a performance-like aspect, especially in those cases where pictures were shared accompanying messaging on the subject.<br>The fully enacted and recorded vaccination performances reviewed, a total of 30, feature more than 30 leaders and officials, as on some occasions multiple vaccinees received their vaccine doses at once. In evaluation, we applied a point-scoring system whereby we gave an additional point for each of the following attributes of these performances: (1) MMR: Multiple media representatives present (representing different news organisations in what is reasonably free access for the press); (2): MPIF: Multiple people in the frame(s), i.e., when more than two people were visible in the frame(s) of the shared footage; (3) MW: Mask-wearing applied; (4) PRO: if at least some elements of the regular vaccination procedure were followed in the course of the administration of the vaccine; (5) UC: uncut or mostly uncut footage shared; (6) NOVR: No particular vaccine recommended by anyone present. We argue the relevance of the above as objective evaluation standards for efficacy with a view to the following arguments. MMR acts as a safeguard of procedural transparency and guarantees the potential availability of UC footage; MPIF similarly acts to elicit trust in viewers given the visibility of the additional witnesses to the process; MW demonstrates that the person undergoing vaccination is not yet protected against the disease and takes the risk of infection seriously; PRO indicates that the performance is not extraordinary in every respect and is demonstration of what is to be expected by prospective vaccinees; UC may elicit trust by creating procedural transparency; while NOVR makes it clear that the intended demonstration effect is aimed at encouraging vaccination in general, not just vaccination by a particular vaccine product (perhaps even to the detriment of other vaccine products as such). We were thus able to grade performances on a scale of prospective effectivity (in terms of having the expected perlocutionary/demonstration effect) from 1 to 6 (1 being lease effective, 6 being most effective).