Deepening Class Divide: Public Relations in the Equation between the Covid-19 Pandemic and Vaccine Tourism
Chapter from the book:
Kalemci Tüzün,
İ.
&
Öksüz,
M.
(eds.)
2023.
Multifaceted Research in The Field of Tourism II.
Synopsis
The Covid-19 pandemic has created a global public health crisis but it has also created opportunities for the countries producing and having the Covid-19 vaccine. This period also brought the concept of vaccine tourism, which is a sub-form of health tourism, to public agenda and media. Considering the inequalities in access to vaccines and health opportunities, media texts on vaccine tourism have become texts reproducing the class inequalities. This period has necessitated to discuss health/healthcare public relations, which is defined as a current form of public relations, from a wider perspective. Health public relations has gone beyond being a practice that manages relationships between health institutions and their publics, and has expanded to include strategic communication of all actors working for global public health. In this context, it is possible to state that the most visible area of health public relations in vaccine tourism is news. Conceptualizing news about vaccine tourism as public relations news, this study evaluates public relations news from two perspectives. On the one hand, the study has examined how public relations news about vaccine tourism reproduces inequality in access to vaccines. On the other hand, it has revealed news has potential to show the relationship between class divide and vaccine tourism. This findings show that health public relations can support the management of relations between actors in the fight against global health problems, but public relations news has the potential to deepen the class divide in the society in global crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic.