The “vaccine race”: Metaphorical conceptualizations of the search of an immunization against Covid-19

Metaphors have been shown to be paramount in health communication in the light of their capacity to make concepts more concrete and, consequently, simple. In the wake of the #ReframeCovid initiative (2020) and similar researches, which highlighted the ubiquity and relevance of figurative language during the coronavirus pandemic, this paper aims at providing a qualitative analysis of metaphors in mass media content with respect to the search of a coronavirus vaccine. The analysis was conducted from a contrastive perspective in Italian, English, German, and Russian. It pinpoints the most frequent source domains of such metaphors and provides an overview of the contexts in which they are used, i.e. the aspects of this phenomenon they frame, through practical examples. Finally, some considerations are made with respect to issues connected to the use of some of these metaphors, also from the translatological viewpoint.