Talk given at 2nd European Conference of Science Journalists, 03 November, 2015

1. The 2009 A(H1N1)v flu
pandemic in the media
Csaba Molnár PHD
Magyar Nemzet
molcsa@gmail.com
molnarcsaba.net

2. 2009 flu pandemic
• The 2009 flu pandemic or swine flu was an influenza pandemic involving
H1N1 influenza virus
• Starting at the spring of 2009 until spring of 2010
• Approx. 10-200 million people infected, 280000 dead (18500 death are
proven to be connected to the pandemic)
• In Hungary 134 death are connected to the pandemic, 5 pregnant women
• 16% of pregnant women got vaccinated in Hungary, contrary to the 95% in
Stockholm (Czeizel, 2011)
• 0.03 mortality rate - contrary to the 100 times higher mortality rate of the
1918 flu pandemic

3. Role of media
• Front page coverage almost every day since the identification and
fast spread of the virus
• Research of these articles looking for the signs of biased opinion,
sensationalism or political interests
• One-year long monitoring of eight British newspaper (Hilton & Hunt,
2011, Medical Research Council)
• Newspapers categorized as ‚serious’, ‚middle-market tabloid’ and ‚tabloid’
• Articles categorized as ‚alarmist’, ‚reassuring’ or ‚neither’
• 5647 articles containing the phrase ‚H1N1’, 1.93 articles/newspaper/day
(incl Sundays)

4. Number of published papers during the
pandemic

5. Content of articles
• Changes over time:
• Beginning: global effects of the pandemic
• Later: national morbidity
• First deaths: status of the pandemic in the UK
• Most of the papers were neither reassuring or alarming
• One third of people used some kind of prevention
• Hardly half of them would vaccinated themselves
• Disappearance of articles on the pandemic calmed people

6. Representation of the pandemic globally
• Review of papers investigating the representation of the 2009 flu
pandemic in media analyzed European, Chinese, American and
Australian newspapers and TV-chanels (Klemm et al, 2014)
• Investigated if media dramatized the situation
• Most paper were factual, not dramatized
• Most papers were about the threat of the pandemic with less
attention to prevention and the effect of counter-measures
•As a possible consequence, people did not react properly to the pandemic

7. Reaction in Hungarian media
• One thesis at (Horváth, 2010, Corvinus University) investigated the
articles related to the pandemic published in the two largest
Hungarian national daily newspapers
• No statistics were used to confirm/reject the hypotheses
• Two characteristics specific to Hungarian articles:
• Role of the MDs and specialists shifted to politicians over time
• The pandemic and the countermeasures taken became the subject of internal
political debates (elections were held on the spring of 2010)

8. Opinions about the vaccination in Hungarian
media
• Articles described the assumed (and not confirmed) side-effects of
the vaccination as frequently as the flu itself
• People were unsure about the vaccination, and this was represented
and even strengthened in the media
• Officials and MDs were not against the vaccination in public, but in
private the echoed the conspiracy theories
• Phobia against the flu vaccination has decreased and hardly any
mass-resistance were experience in last years – despite that they
contained the vaccine against H1N1, as they did in 2009/10

9. Thank you
Contact
• molcsa@gmail.com
• molnarcsaba.net
• +36304558181
• Skype: molcsa@outlook.com
• linkedin.com/in/molnarcs