Description
During the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines and pharmaceuticals dominated discourse and discussions of the global response to the pandemic, partly due to the high fatality rate of COVID-19. While these medical tools have always been important in responding to diseases, their significance in global health governance was unprecedented during the COVID-19 pandemic. Aiming to understand pharmaceuticals' taking centre stage of global health governance, this study investigates how vaccines and pharmaceutical companies were framed during the COVID-19 pandemic and how the frames developed over time, by analysing tweets from key actors in global health governance in between 2020 and 2022. The findings of this study show that the power of pharmaceutical companies during the COVID-19 pandemic was produced not only by pharmaceutical companies’ material abilities or their discourse communications, but also their power was shaped by others’ discourses emphasising the importance of the resources that pharmaceutical companies monopolised and pharma companies’ ability to control that life-saving resources. As a result, this study argues that framing of vaccines and pharmaceutical companies during the COVID-19 pandemic not only reflected their influence on global health, but also enhanced it—particularly that of pharmaceutical companies—by defining and shaping the features of their power in global health governance.
