Evaluation of Digital News about the COVID-19 Vaccine Turkovac in terms of Health Reporting Criteria

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how vulnerable societies can be in the face of infectious diseases. The outbreak of the pandemic has also demonstrated the importance of reliable information in managing the disease and that false or fake news spreads as fast as the virus during the pandemic, posing a public health threat. In other words, the pandemic was also accompanied by an infodemic, that can be defined as the excess and spread of both true and false information. While societies` need for reliable information and news consumption has increased, news has played an essential role in informing and raising awareness during the pandemic. Accordingly, this research’s primary concern is to critically analyse news about Turkey's first domestic COVID-19 vaccine "Turkovac" in digital news media using the criteria of HealthNewsReview.org and the Vaccine News Preparation Declaration prepared jointly by journalists, academics and public health experts. The research is based on a qualitative and quantitative content analysis of the research data consisting of 502 news articles published between January 1 and December 31, 2021, on 12 different newspapers and news sites. It was found that the news analysed did not adequately and reliably convey information about the vaccine development process and the vaccine to the public. While scientific data on the effectiveness of vaccines and the limitations of vaccine trials are not sufficiently covered in the news, nationalist discourse has been observed to dominate the news. The findings of this study fill the knowledge gaps in this under-examined research area