COVID Implications for Southeastern States: A Thematic Analysis of Influences from Leaders and Health Agencies Social Media Platforms

The problem that the researcher will investigate is the conflicting social media messages between the Office of the President and the two preeminent national health organizations (the CDC and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the U.S. National Institutes of Health) regarding the COVID-19 crisis. The purpose of this study is to explore alignment and disconnect in the social media messaging between the Office of the President and the top two health organizations and subsequent state government decisions around the COVID-19 pandemic in the southeast region of the United States. Given the research purpose of exploring the alignment between expert information, social media coverage, and leadership decisions around the COVID-19 pandemic in the southeast region of the United States, the research approach was that of a qualitative analysis employing the method of thematic analysis of social media messaging from the Office of the President and the top two health organizations during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, the southeastern region of the United States chose to disregard the advice of the CDC and the NIAID offered through their respective Twitter accounts during the first six months of 2020, in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, regarding wearing face coverings, testing, staying at home, and vaccines. According to Chen et al. (2022) and Funk et al. (2022), the political affiliation of the state governors was an overarching contributing factor. Though the Tweets of President Trump initially also supported these initiatives to mitigate the spread of the vaccine, his Tweets and actions in the later part of the study period were not in support of these initiatives, leading Republican followers, specifically, to follow suit. The nation’s two top health agencies and the President were often not in alignment due to a lack of a concerted effort to work together to provide the best possible information to the general public. Because this study primarily focused on the decisions made in the southeastern region of the United States, it would be beneficial to extend this study to other populations to determine experiential differences and similarities.