Government messaging about COVID-19 vaccination in Canada and Australia: a Narrative Policy Framework study
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Abstract
Background
Storytelling and narratives are critical components to public policy and have been central to public policy communicators throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Aim
This study applied the Narrative Policy Framework to compare and contrast the policy narratives of the Canadian and Australian Prime Ministers regarding COVID-19 vaccination.
Methods
Official media releases, transcripts and speeches published on the websites of Prime Minister Morrison and Prime Minister Trudeau between 31 August 2020 and 10 September 2021 relating to COVID-19 vaccines were thematically analysed according to the Narrative Policy Framework.
Results
The policy narratives of Scott Morrison and Justin Trudeau tended towards describing both governments as heroes for securing and rolling out vaccines. Trudeau tended to focus on the villain of COVID-19 while Morrison regularly described other countries as victims of COVID-19 to position Australia as superior in its decision-making. These findings also demonstrate how narratives shifted over time due to changing COVID-19 case numbers, emergence of rare complications associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine and as new information arose.
Conclusion
These findings offer lessons for COVID-19 times as well as future pandemics and disease outbreaks by providing insight into how policy narratives influenced policy processes in both Australia and Canada.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.12.19.21268042: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter:…
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.12.19.21268042: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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