Prof. Daniel Hallin made a presentation at the University of Miami, at a colloquium sponsored by the School of Communication and the Hanley Democracy Center, titled “Pandemic and Populism: Health Crisis Communication in an Age of Populism.” Prof. Hallin’s presentation, focused mainly on the U.S. case, outlined the general challenges facing public health officials and public officials generally during a pandemic, including the fact that in the case of an emerging disease, scientific knowledge of the new pathogen is still in formation, and the degree of uncertainty is extremely high. The public health community has developed best practices for communicating in this this kind of situation frequently practiced them, and used them relatively successfully in previous health emergencies. In this case, however, Prof. Hallin argues, effective pandemic communication was disrupted by the high degree of politicization of the pandemic, which resulted in extraordinary partisan patterns in public response and in health outcomes. He argues that while political leaders must necessarily take responsibility for an emergency of this scale, and while debate is inevitable, the partisan division is not, and is clearly connected in important ways to populism, coming from political leaders, populist media and important currents of popular sentiment.
