Language, Individual & Society, Volume 15, 2021

Abstract: COVID-19 is not only a virus that attacks our bodies and lives, but also a political information subject/object navigating global networks and shaping the new configurations of our political lives. Thus, the biological spread of the virus is, in a sense, mirrored by its mediatized dissemination. This article examines the information problems connected with COVID-19 within the larger analytic framework of “health communication.” It takes the latter in its classical version, which relates to “normal” times, in so far as we can ever speak of normal times in the health sector, but certainly of late we have been experiencing an exception to these times. The article attempts to re-interpret the more or less consolidated models and variants of the doctor/patient relationship, which have become topical once more, ever since the pandemic brought health communication and its possible modalities to the forefront of the global political agenda. Today, the world’s population in its entirety finds itself in the position/condition of ‘patient,’ a patient who must follow the doctors’ orders, imposing a mass treatment, which has significant repercussions on the management of communal freedom. Confronted with this configuration, the study investigates whether it is possible to hand back a modicum of centrality to the patient/citizen, one that is the calibrated capacity of participation in the management of health within the public political spectrum that the health issue in question has recently raised.