About

Vaccine Gangs refers to a tongue-in-cheek rivalry between recipients of the numerous COVID-19 vaccines, namely the recipients of the Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines. Social media users who have received one of the vaccines have jokingly expressed loyalty to others who have received the same vaccine, leading to a kind of tribalism that has been compared to that which developed over phenomena like Hogwarts houses and Pokémon GO teams. Users will often identify themselves as "Pfizer Gang," "Moderna Gang," etc.

Origin

Expression of loyalty to a vaccinated group of people is often expressed as "Team X." The first tweet to use "Team Pfizer" and "Team Moderna" was posted November 29th, 2020 by Twitter^[1] user @CaseyJohnston (shown below).

Spread

Over the following months, as more vaccines became available, the tribalism between different vaccine recipients intensified. On Etsy, users began creating merchandise that would display which vaccination the customer had received (examples^[2][3] shown below).

The phenomenon also led to memes imagining the "fight" between those vaccinated with different shots. For example, on April 11th, 2021, a reaction image was posted to iFunny^[4] by user Imagine poking fun at the idea, gaining over 120 likes (shown below, left). On April 12th, Redditor Zack_Brangan posted a Bleach meme making fun of the concept to /r/Bleach,^[5] gaining over 1,400 points (shown below, right).

On Twitter, some users have added "X Gang" to their display names and have tweeted in support of their various vaccine groups. On April 6th, user @AshleyFeinberg^[6] joked she was "ready to die" for her "Moderna brothers and sisters," gaining over 460 retweets and 11,000 likes (shown below, left). User @TrevorDmusic^[7] opined the rivalry was similar to the Pokémon GO team rivalry (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References