How urgency-driven public health communication perpetuates inequities
Global public health systems necessarily approach emergent threats with great urgency. As Julie Gerdes argues in Infectious Urgency: Communication and Power in the Making of Global Health Emergencies, that urgency itself functions as a rhetorical logic. And this logic shapes prevention tactics, outbreak communication, and response efforts, often in ways that reify power and exacerbate global disparities.
Gerdes scrutinizes how power, authority, and equity move through the prevention, declaration, communication design, and responsephases of public health emergencies of international concern (PHEICs) designated by the World Health Organization, including Ebola, Zika, and covid-19. She draws on rhetorical theory and her firsthand experience in global health to provide a nuanced analysis of scientific publications, emergency declaration deliberations, interviews with public health practitioners, and an oral history project on vaccine campaigns.
Julie Gerdes is assistant professor of technical and professional writing and rhetoric at Virginia Tech, where she is a co–principal investigator of the NSF COMPASS Center, a predictive intelligence program for pandemic prediction. Previously she served as a technical advisor for USAID.
