Cross-Border Health Data from Legislation to Implementation: A Critical Discursive Approach to COVID-19 Responses

With a focus on health datafication in the European Union, this article sets out to investigate a few highlights from the EU’s pronouncements on issues of public health and technology, through the tools of Critical Discourse Studies. As an unprecedented public health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that, when it comes to healthcare, EU countries are disconnected from one another. In fact, health datafication is misaligned between Member States and even within national health systems themselves. However, the tech solutionist position that strives for full interoperability of systems in public health (as for contact tracing apps) often disregards the ethical, legal and social issues related to the use of technology itself, i.e. data protection, impact and trust. The aim of the analysis is to illustrate the role of the linguistic and discursive framing of the values and priorities that inform the debate about pandemic response management, to which millions of EU citizens have been exposed in the last two years.