The Agenda Building Process of Pandemic Influenza H1N1 in Taiwan-A Case of Vaccine Adverse Event

One of the World Health Organization''s advices to nations in response to the pandemic was stockpiling H1N1 vaccines.
In Taiwan, heath authorities placed orders for 15 million doses of the vaccine, which were distributed to inoculate in November.
Usually, severe infectious diseases grab the headlines. This study tries to tell how consistent the press reports could be with the press releases issued by the authorities on H1N1 events by comparing 64 press releases issued by Center for Disease Control (CDC) between November 1, 2009 and February 24, 2010 with 1,184 news pieces about H1N1 surfaced in the meantime on Taiwan’s four major newspapers—China Times, Liberty Times, United Daily News and Apple Daily.
With literature reviews for agenda building process and analysis the contents of data, this study also attempts to explore the interaction between information sources and reporters as well as the media agenda transition in the life cycle.
The comparisons show that the newspapers tended the neutral and positive attitude toward CDC. The reporters leaned towards adopting CDC’s statements on how vaccination work and flu control were going on. But when it came to suspected adverse events which claimed lives, the newspapers turned to adopt hostile statements against CDC.
CDC, when spelling out vaccination and pandemic control work to the general public, was a reliable information source for news media because of its empowered authority. CDC also owned dominant access to media coverage and played an epidemiologist role for reporters in the whole events. But in the unexpected events that were linked to the risk of the vaccine, the relationships between CDC and news media was diverse.
The news media are opposed to CDC on how this institute handled vaccine adverse events. Especially there happened a focal event which a boy died after the first injection, reporters usually exclusively took the words from people at the heart of the disputed cases and questioned CDC with biased standpoint. The news pieces mentioned about other agenda were outnumbered by those about adverse events.
In dealing with the risk and benefit communication about vaccination policy, CDC may provide the general public comprehensible information. Sensitive cases such as kids, expectant women need extra communication skills. CDC’s press releases should in advance manage the agenda in order to minimize the damage that the adverse events may cause to the public trustworthiness of the government.