Infectious diseases, the state and the people at risk Health communication in Vietnam

Health communication is more than an instrument of risk management to inform and educate the general public. It is also a political arena, in which stakeholders compete to impose their own view of what risks deserve public attention; how roles in risk management should be shared between people at risk, people posing risk and people in charge. The current research sought to understand the role of an authoritarian state in response to infectious diseases (EIDs) in the context of global health politics.
The current research also provided a broader sense of the risks posed by infectious diseases: infectious diseases are not only an epidemiological threat to public health; they also pose a political threat to the legitimacy of the nation state. The concept of adaptive authoritarianism and a broader view of the risk of EIDs (as a political threat to a nation state’s legitimacy) help us to understand why authoritarian states such as Vietnam may adopt a deliberative form of risk communication in any particular risk context (e.g., SARS, HPAI, the 2014 measles crisis), while maintaining conventional forms in other contexts (e.g., HIV/AIDS and HFMD). Social media as an open access information source may fundamentally challenge a government’s application of conventional forms of health communication in authoritarian states. The emergence of social media can be an important ingredient in the transformation of the power balance between the state and its citizens in the field of national communication.