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Framing has previously been studied in the field of pandemic preparedness and global health governance and influenza pandemics have usually been framed in terms of security and evidence-based medicine on a global scale. This paper is based on the pandemic preparedness plans, published after 2009, from eight European countries. We study how pandemic preparedness is framed and how pandemic influenza in general is narrated in the plans. All plans contain references to ‘uncertainty’, ‘pandemic phases’, ‘risk management’, ‘vulnerability’ and ‘surveillance’. These themes were all framed differently in the studied plans. The preparedness plans in the member states diverge in ways that will challenge the ambition of the European Union to make the pandemic preparedness plans interoperable and to co-ordinate the member states during future pandemics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sex workers in Europe have been dramatically impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated measures. Ignored by most governments, excluded from social and economic measures put in place to protect other workers, sex workers were left to fend for themselves. The article, an abridged version of a previous report by the ICRSE, illustrates the impact of COVID-19 on sex workers by focusing on how the pandemic affected the socio-economic, health and safety conditions of sex worker communities and how they pro-actively responded to the first waves of the crisis in 2020. Based on data gathered through community research, the authors outline the specific ways in which sex workers living under different sex work legal regimes were hit by the crisis. Crucially, in countries such as France, Sweden and Ireland, where an 'End Demand' legislation is in place to supposedly 'rescue sex workers', these did not benefit from any state support. The article suggests that sex worker community organisations helped limit the spread of the virus through peer support and peer education, protecting not only sex workers' health, but society at large and showing similarities to the role of chaperones of public health sex workers had during the AIDS crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]