Vulnerabilities

Chapter 6 explores the narratives of people who, due to vulnerabilities associated with their health status, including severe respiratory illness and HIV-positive serostatus, and because of coincident pregnancy, had to respond to the pandemic to protect themselves and unborn children. This chapter, therefore, addresses the importance of biography for understanding the social impact of pandemics. It shows how pandemics as historical events intersect with biographies and, from the point of view of individuals, cannot be meaningfully separated. This temporal intersectionality of pandemics and lived experiences is particularly well illuminated by a narrative approach. A feature of this chapter, too, is a focus on invisibility, that is, the ways in which being at risk was invisible to the “healthy” majority.

Contagion

Contagion is an age-old method of signifying infectious diseases like influenza and is a rich metaphor with strong biopolitical connotations for understandings of social distance, that is, the self as distinct from the other in the sense of space and identity. Contagion is therefore an important metaphor for the social distancing approaches recommended by experts during a pandemic, as was the case in 2009. This chapter, therefore, examines how research participants enacted social distancing as a method for reducing risk. It reflects on how these narratives reflected the meanings of contagion linked with distance, in particular, the notion that threat emerges elsewhere and in the figure of the other.

Pandemic Tales

Chapter 2 considers in more detail the growing significance of narrative approaches to health communication on pandemic threats, reflecting on the conceptual bases for this turn in light of perspectives from narrative theory and biopolitical accounts of infectious diseases. Key themes are the folk-tale undercurrents of pandemic narratives that appear in news media and in the advice of experts and therefore also their significance for the individuals who engage with them. A key point is that narrative and its mediations are a primary point of contact for publics coming to know of a rapidly emerging public health crisis. In this respect, we introduce Sarah’s story of how she realized that she was herself possibly at risk of the virus, in part because of stories on the pandemic circulated in media she consumed.

Introduction

This chapter sets the scene for the book by introducing the significance of narrative and its mediations for the experience of a global public health emergency. It provides some necessary detail on the swine flu pandemic of 2009 to help the reader situate the empirical material to come in following chapters. The chapter also introduces “Cameron’s infection story” to explain how we use narrative in this book and make links with narrative theory in the social sciences. Cameron’s story also helps to locate the book in the lived experience of everyday people in 2009 and foregrounds the focus of this book on the stories of individuals affected in different ways by the pandemic.

Immunity

Immunity is another important biopolitical metaphor that helped to shape storytelling about swine flu in everyday life. Immunity has a double meaning in that it is a biomedical concept linked with bodies and vaccines, but it is also a legal concept concerning self and the suspension of responsibilities to collective life in particular circumstances. Chapter 5 explores how talk of personal immunity was seen as a means of surviving what was seen to be an unavoidable infection and also an individual possession open to acquisition and cultivation. This “choice immunity,” as we call it, appeared to trouble efforts by public health systems in the United Kingdom and Australia to promote vaccination, particularly in the collective sense of “herd immunity.”

“Be Alert, Not Alarmed!”

Chapter 3 examines the keynote of pandemic communications in 2009: “Be alert, not alarmed.” A central communication challenge of the 2009 pandemic was advising publics throughout the world to prepare themselves for a possible health catastrophe, but without inspiring panic and therefore jeopardizing effective government. This imperative has been characterized by scholars in the field as the “Goldilocks” approach to messaging, underlining the folktale qualities of the public life of pandemics. As people in our research pointed out, reassuring the general public that they should not be overly alarmed undermined the sense of urgency that came into the lives of “at risk” people. The chapter therefore explores how our research participants contended with the preparedness message and its potentially contradictory effects.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter revisits the key themes of the book and reflects on them in light of the prospects for “narrative public health.” The significance of narrative and its mediations for a global public emergency and the more general turn to narrative in health communications, can be construed as the formation of a narrative public health. We reflect on how these uses of narrative are more or less undertaken at face value, without some of the benefits to be found in critical scholarship on narrative. The chapter argues therefore for a reassertion of the narrative’s potential for critical reflection on how life can be lived, and the salience it may have for health crisis. A keynote of this chapter is the critical reflexivity exhibited in the persuasion narratives constructed by publics to explain their engagements with the emergence of a pandemic threat in their life worlds.

“The Boy Who Cried Wolf” and Other Post-Trust Stories

The 2009 swine flu pandemic turned out to be milder than it seemed to be in the first few weeks, yet it was serious for those with serious illness or who were pregnant at the time. These features of the pandemic produced communications dilemmas for experts, including a threat to public trust. With reference to the moral tale of the “boy who cried wolf,” this chapter reflects on how people in our research spoke of the eventual mildness of the 2009 pandemic and how this situation was construed as a false alarm, with implications for public trust in science and politics surrounding world-scale problems such as pandemics, population vaccination, superbugs, and health security.

News Media Hype?

A common theme in the stories of the people we interviewed was the action and reputation of news media, including printed, digital, and television news. These media were often the first source of knowledge about the emerging pandemic and for some the basis for adoption of a new at risk identity. This chapter examines a key finding that individuals regarded the news media to have hyped the pandemic alongside textual analyses from other scholars that shows news media in 2009 to have been mainly fact driven and not inflammatory. The chapter takes up this apparent paradox in light of audience expectations shaped by previous experiences of pandemic narratives and the large volume of news reporting during the period. The chapter explains how individuals were skeptical of media and therefore cautiously took on their new pandemic risk identities through what we have framed as “persuasion” narrative.