The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the shifting role of healthcare
evidence in public health presentations. This article investigates the rhetoric of those
presentations as a phenomenon indicating both the commitment to evidence-based
public health messaging and its political loading in three interlinked case ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the shifting role of healthcare
evidence in public health presentations. This article investigates the rhetoric of those
presentations as a phenomenon indicating both the commitment to evidence-based
public health messaging and its political loading in three interlinked case studies: CGI
visualisation; ‘podium’ presentation; and the NSO Fleming leak of COVID-19 contact
tracing data. The pandemic has seen healthcare evidence attain ever-greater visibility
in public forums, and those forums have themselves undergone rapid transformation.
‘Podium’ presentations such as press conferences have featured colourful imagery,
and the manifold visualisations of SARS-CoV-2 which have accompanied television
broadcasts and web pages display an insistent internal rhetoric. I analyse both forms
of rhetoric for what they say about the ‘forensic’ moment created by COVID-19, and
evaluate each in relation to Weizman’s conception of the forum, which enables both
‘frontstage’ corporate and governmental image-building and public scrutiny. This
paper evaluates the politics of the presentational strategies which have arisen around
COVID-19 and the ethical potential of the forum.
