Strategic Communication of Health Regulatory Agencies in Latin America on Twitter during the COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign: Responding, Remaining Silent, or Aligning?

• Grant number: 25/12985-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: October 01, 2025
• End date: September 30, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - Public Policies
• Principal Investigator: Elize Massard da Fonseca
• Grantee: María Alejandra Costa
• Supervisor: Laura Chaques Bonafont
• Host Institution: Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo (EAESP). Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Institut Barcelona D'Estudis Internacionals, Spain
• Associated to the scholarship: 24/00811-3 - The Governance and Politics of Pharmaceutical Regulation, BP.PD

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, health regulatory agencies faced unprecedented public exposure in a context marked by epistemic uncertainty, political pressure, and disputes over technical authority. In this setting, communication emerged as a central mechanism for institutional positioning. This study advances a situated perspective on regulatory communication, challenging dominant approaches that frame it as a defensive reaction to reputational threats. From this standpoint, communication is understood as a strategic practice through which agencies construct and negotiate their position within dynamic governance networks. It argues that decisions such as selectively responding or prioritizing interlocutors depend on the relational power of the actor engaging the agency and the specific moment within the crisis cycle. The empirical analysis compares three Latin American regulatory agencies - ANMAT (Argentina), ANVISA (Brazil), and COFEPRIS (Mexico) - based on discursive interactions on Twitter with key institutional actors between 2020 and 2022. The study employs egocentric network analysis and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to examine how these agencies' relational positioning evolved. The corpus of tweets was built through a rigorous process of data collection and systematization, developed over the last six months of postdoctoral research in Brazil, which included both the coding for data scraping and the extraction of the data. The research stay at IBEI will enable a deeper comparative network analysis and advance understanding of the relational dynamics that shape regulatory communication in crisis contexts.