Abstract

In 2006 the HPV vaccine was approved in Denmark and in 2008 it was implemented in the Danish children’s vaccination programme. In 2015 the media began writing about a lot of young women who fell ill after getting the HPV vaccination and the attendance of the vaccination fell significantly. The aim of this study is to examine whether there is a coherence between the media coverage of the HPV vaccine and the low attendance of the vaccinations as well as to observe how the media coverage have changed over time. In this study, articles about the HPV vaccine are collected from the major newspapers in Denmark from the first one which was published in 1991 until 2017. The contents of the articles are examined in periods with a great media density. The results have shown that media coverage is fluctuating and typically, for each peak period of media density the media content was mainly dominated by a single or very few events or topics and that these topics would vary over time. Both the topics and the tone would change over time. There is a clear concordance between relinquishing the vaccine and the shift to a critical framing, which alarms the audience. This suggest a concordance between the media representation of the HPV vaccine and the attendance to the vaccination programme.