Forensic rhetoric: COVID-19, the forum and the boundaries of healthcare evidence

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the shifting role of healthcare evidence in public health presentations. This article investigates the rhetoric of those presentations as a phenomenon indicating both the commitment to evidence-based public health messaging and its political loading in three interlinked case studies: computer-generated imagery ; ‘podium’ presentation and the NSO Fleming leak of COVID-19 contact tracing data. The pandemic has seen healthcare evidence attain ever-greater visibility in public forums, and those forums have themselves undergone rapid transformation. ‘Podium’ presentations such as press conferences have featured colourful imagery, and the manifold visualisations of SARS-CoV-2 which have accompanied television broadcasts and web pages display an insistent internal rhetoric. I analyse both forms of rhetoric for what they say about the ‘forensic’ moment created by COVID-19, and evaluate each in relation to Weizman’s conception of the forum, which enables both ‘frontstage’ corporate and governmental image-building and public scrutiny. This paper evaluates the politics of the presentational strategies which have arisen around COVID-19 and the ethical potential of the forum.

Medical Humanities in Transition

“…They, thus, demonstrate the value of historical examples and artistic interventions in the process of sense-making in times of crisis. In 'Forensic rhetoric', David Houston Jones (2023) examines the issue of healthcare evidence in public presentations during the early stages of the pandemic. He scrutinises the rhetoric of such presentations in order to evaluate their politics and ethics.…”