Abstract
This chapter investigates how pandemics are represented rhetorically and practically and how groups and individuals respond with their own constructions that complicate the work of public health. The lack of definitional distinction and phase boundaries within the World Health Organization’s pandemic response has created challenges to health actions that are further exacerbated by the political and public perception of labeling something a pandemic. In the hands of former US President Trump, pandemic was manipulated to either downplay the severity of COVID-19 or persuade the public of policy implementation on adjacent issues, such as immigration. Similarly, some social media constructions of the pandemic have perpetuated false information by modifying the word pandemic (into terms like #plandemic) as an attempt to not only discredit the existence of the pandemic, but to also destabilize the meaning of the word with regard to COVID-19. At the other extreme, trending terms like #pandemicbaking did not change its understood meaning, but rather added the individual lived experience of a pandemic, taking the word out of a population health context. The malleability of the word pandemic exposes the rhetorical complexities of health communication and the social and political construction of disease.