ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic was caused by a new zoonotic disease, so when it first emerged, knowledge of COVID-19 was absent or scant. This dearth of scientific knowledge coupled with the informational “noise” of the infodemic and the urgent need to inform populations during the public health crisis created a challenge for authorities around the world: How to communicate the evolving knowledge of the disease to concerned publics. This chapter explores how Danish authorities represented knowledge of COVID-19 on their shared website coronasmitte.dk during the first four months of 2021, approximately one year into the pandemic. Foucauldian discourse analysis revealed four main representations of COVID-19 knowledge in the data set. Scientific knowledge of the disease was represented as being temporally in flux and along an epistemic spectrum from certain to provisional. The debated strategy of herd immunity was constructed as dubious due to lack of scientific evidence, while parents’ experiential knowledge of their child’s symptoms of the disease was constructed as valid and complementary to scientific knowledge. On the whole, the website represented knowledge in ways that reflected the contingencies of scientific research to a greater degree than publics usually experience in information from civic authorities.
