Nigerian media coverage of medical progress on the development of COVID-19 vaccine

There is a global shift in discource on issues related to COVID-19 with greater attention paid to the vaccine. COVID-19. Despite this, the literature on media coverage of COVID-19 is yet to be extended to media coverage of issues related to medical progress on a vaccine for the virus. The objective of the current study was to fill this gap by examining how Nigerian media report COVID-19 vaccine development In doing so, attention was paid to the frequency of coverage, sources of stories as well as story type used. Two newspapers and TV stations were sampled for the current study. The current study made use of content analysis with a code sheet as the instrument for data collection. The result of the current study revealed that only 23% of the media stories on COVID-19 were related to vaccine development. Additionally, most of the stories made use of official sources as well as straight news. Comparatively, newspapers covered more in vaccine development than TV. The implications of these results on medical communication and theory are discussed.