Viral Language: Analysing the COVID‐19 Pandemic in Public Discourse, By Luke C.Collins, VeronikaKoller, New York, Routledge, 2024, 210 pp. £29.59 (paperback), ISBN: 9780367756666

Luke C. Collins and Veronika Koller explore the critical role of language in shaping public perception and discourse during this unprecedented crisis.This insightful work is particularly essential for readers of the Journal of Poverty and Public Policy, as it delves deeply into the intersection of language, public policy, health disparities, and social equity.Collins and Koller assert that language serves as a vehicle for shaping public attitudes and influencing behavior, ultimately affecting policy outcomes.They unravel the complexities of how words influence our collective understanding of pressing social issues, revealing strategies that can either reinforce existing inequalities or promote social justice.In Chapter 3, the authors investigate how politicians utilize the journey metaphor to describe various aspects of the pandemic and responsive measures.The authors introduce the #ReframeCovid project, which compiles metaphoric expressions from multiple languages into a data set to showcase efforts to translate diverse COVID-19 experiences into more familiar scenarios.This systematic approach to identifying and analyzing metaphors underscores their fundamental role in broader health discourses, emphasizing how metaphorical language can shape public understanding and inform policy decisions.