ABSTRACT
This, the first of two empirical chapters, explores the communication about the risks of the pandemic and associated responsibilisation evident in the transcripts of the COVID-19 press conferences of the World Health Organization (WHO) and at national levels (the UK and Denmark) during the month of March 2020, at the start of the pandemic. The analyses of risk and responsibilisation conducted in this chapter are situated in relation to the findings of a review of the literature that explores COVID-19 pandemic literature relating to risks and responsibilisation, existing studies that adopted framing and discourse analytical approaches to pandemic communication, as well as studies exploring the COVID-19 pandemic response of WHO and in the UK and Denmark. The chapter identifies a more unstable, shifting framing of the pandemic in the British than in the Danish data, a tight coupling between risks and responsibilisation in all of the data sets, a reliance on national values in the Danish and British examples and some responsibilisation of the public to hold their politicians to account in the WHO data.
