When Politics Meets Pandemic: How Prime Minister Netanyahu and a Small Team Communicated Health and Risk Information to the Israeli Public During the Early Stages of COVID-19

Abstract

Background

The coronavirus brought the world’s leaders to the center of the media stage, where they not only managed the COVID-19 pandemic but also communicated it to the public. The means they used to communicate the global pandemic reveal their strategies and the narratives they chose to create in their nation’s social consciousness. In Israel, the crisis broke out after three election cycles, such that the government in charge of the crisis was an interim government under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was operating under three criminal indictments. This study sought to examine the ways in which Prime Minister Netanyahu and two senior Israel Ministry of Health officials—Director General Moshe Bar Siman Tov and Prof. Sigal Sadetsky, Head of Public Health Services—communicated information about the health crisis in Israel during what has been termed the first wave and the beginning of the second wave.

Methods and Sample

The research adopted qualitative methods (discourse, content and thematic analysis) to analyze the communication strategies and compare them to health and risk communication. Triangulated data collection from different data sources was used to increase the credibility and validity of the results. The research sample comprised the following sources from March 3 through June 21, 2020: transcripts of 19 press conferences and 12 press interviews, 95 emergency regulations signed by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and 52 articles in major Israeli newspapers.

Results

Netanyahu and the Health Ministry Director General used an apocalyptic narrative to communicate COVID-19 to the public. The main strategies used in constructing this narrative were intimidation, lack of information transparency, giving the public conflicting instructions contrary to the health and risk communicating approach, and using a health crisis to promote political intentions and actions.

Conclusion

Communicating health crises to the public, particularly ongoing crises like COVID-19, requires that leaders implement the health and risk communication approach and create a cooperative narrative that does not rely on a strategy of intimidation, but rather on empathy and on fact-based and transparent information.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• health and risk communication
• Prime Minister Netanyahu
• Israeli public
• qualitative research

Abbreviations

COVID-19, coronavirus disease 2019; OECD, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; PHEIC, Public Health Emergency of International Concern; WHO, World Health Organization.

Ethics Approval

Because the study was based on public knowledge and not on human subjects, it was exempt from human subjects’ ethics approval by the Ethics Committee of The Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences at the University of Haifa.

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.