Ethical Evaluation of the Concept of Soft Power and Related Medical Terminology in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Since its turn into a pandemic in a short time, a viral disease described as COVID-19 which emerged in Wuhan, Hubei has deeply affected the medical, economic, social and ethical balances all over the world. Even though it has been more than a year, the continuation of the potency of the disease and the emergence of new mutant strains further increase the concern over this issue. While efforts to create a specific treatment protocol for the disease are continuing, the availability of vaccines in different countries for the disease has led to a vaccine-focused approach. After a while, the concept of soft power, which came to the fore at certain points of the connection between the countries that produce the vaccine and the countries that will buy the vaccine, added a different dimension to the COVID-19 pandemic. The concept of ‘soft power’ was first introduced and used by Joseph Nye in 1990. This concept, which has a different meaning from the traditional discourse of power, started to be used in everyday language by academicians and politicians shortly after it was first used. With the interconnection of power and influence in recent years, this concept has turned into a new perspective for influence due to its turn towards a specific purpose. The vaccine diplomacy observed with the development of new vaccines for the COVID-19 pandemic is one of these perspectives. It is observed that new balances are built on COVID-19 by using vaccine diplomacy as a kind of soft power and including it within the borders of inter-country communication. In this study, the soft power which came into existence over Covid-19 and vaccine diplomacy that emerged due to the soft power were tried to be evaluated by using up-to-date sources. Observing the effect of this soft power on COVID-19 vaccines in this process will allow us to make different evaluations.