January 2021 Sheila Jasanoff, Stephen Hilgartner, J. Benjamin Hurlbut, Onur Özgöde, Margarita Rayzberg
This 121-page report is the first major publication of Comparative Covid Response: Crisis, Knowledge, Politics (CompCoRe) – a cross-national study of the policy responses of 16 countries across five continents. It provides a preliminary distillation of the study’s initial findings. Led by a team based at Harvard, Cornell and Arizona State Universities, CompCoRe is a collaborative undertaking involving more than 60 researchers from around the world.
The participating countries are Australia, Austria, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Additionally, teams from Indonesia and Peru, as well as an Africa Group, are included as CompCoRe affiliates.
Science February 2021 Vol. 371, Issue 6532, pp. 893-894. DOI: 10.1126/science.abf8762
Stephen Hilgartner, J. Benjamin Hurlbut, Sheila Jasanoff
On 7 November 2020, moments before Kamala Harris and Joe Biden began their victory speeches, giant screens flanking the stage proclaimed, “The people have chosen science.” Yet, nearly 74 million Americans, almost half the voters, had cast their ballots for Donald Trump, thereby presumably not choosing science. Prominent scientists asserted that “science was on the ballot” and lamented that “a significant portion of America doesn’t want science” (1)
But before despairing at the loss of trust in science, we should be sure we are worrying about the right problem. Was “science” really on the ballot? Is it useful to imagine U.S. citizens as divided into pro-science and anti-science camps? Does the label antiscience serve the purposes of deliberative democracy? The answer to these questions is plainly no. A correct diagnosis is essential to repairing the sorry state of science-society relations in the United States.
January 2021 Sheila Jasanoff, Stephen Hilgartner, Wilmot James, Lyal White
This short report draws on two studies—the CompCoRe Interim Report and a report by our African affiliate—that together include 23 countries on six continents. It provides preliminary insights into why COVID-19 has produced different outcomes in different places, how policymakers can better manage national responses in the months ahead, and what we must do to strengthen national and global systems for future health emergencies.
Sheila Jasanoff, Stephen Hilgartner, Wilmot Jones, and Lyal White presented their studies’ results at the Schmidt Futures Forum on Preparedness in January 2021 and in a synthesis report: Learning from Covid-19: A 23-Nation Comparative Study of COVID-19 Response, with Lessons for the Future of Public Health.
This paper discusses the diverse grounds on which litigation during the Covid-19 pandemic tested the nature and limits of power in a public health system that has long functioned like a state within a state. The pandemic revealed a tension between human beings as biomedical subjects, more acted upon than acting, and as social and political subjects, more acting than acted upon. In the regime of what this paper calls public health sovereignty, people are required to observe potentially severe restraints on liberty in the name of the common good and are governed by the disciplinary mechanisms of biopower described by Michel Foucault.
As sociopolitical subjects, however, people can use the competing apparatus of constitutional law to assert solidarities and express affiliations that challenge the reduction of life to the purely biological. In the United States, such resisting claims have included the right to forego treatment on religious grounds, the rights of assembly and association, and the right to demand accountability for the government’s uses of expertise. This paper first describes the landscape of US health and safety regulation, in which responsibility for public health protection is divided between the federal government and the states. It offers a brief history of three earlier episodes that pitted public health sovereignty against claims of individual liberty: compulsory vaccination, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis. The paper then looks at three arenas in which the Covid-19 pandemic has given rise to conflicts between public health and individual liberty: elections, religious freedom, and the scope of executive power. The paper demonstrates that the apparatus of liberty can be used either to promote or to constrain political expression by substituting judicial expertise in law for executive expertise in public health. The paper concludes that American legal thinking has yet to develop modes of reasoning that will consistently strike a judicious balance between claims of personal liberty and the demands of public health.
Trouble in the trough: how uncertainties were downplayed in the UK’s science advice on Covid-19
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications Vol 7, Article number: 122. DOI: 10.1057/s41599-020-00612-w
Warren Pearce
The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic has forced science advisory institutions and processes into an unusually prominent role, and placed their decisions under intense public, political and media scrutiny. In the UK, much of the focus has been on whether the government was too late in implementing its lockdown policy, resulting in thousands of unnecessary deaths. Some experts have argued that this was the result of poor data being fed into epidemiological models in the early days of the pandemic, resulting in inaccurate estimates of the virus’s doubling rate.
In this article, I argue that a fuller explanation is provided by an analysis of how the multiple uncertainties arising from poor quality data, a predictable characteristic of an emergency situation, were represented in the advice to decision makers. Epidemiological modelling showed a wide range of credible doubling rates, while the science advice based upon modelling presented a much narrower range of doubling rates. I explain this puzzle by showing how some science advisors were both knowledge producers (through epidemiological models) and knowledge users (through the development of advice), roles associated with different perceptions of scientific uncertainty. This conflation of experts’ roles gave rise to contradictions in the representation of uncertainty over the doubling rate. Role conflation presents a challenge to science advice, and highlights the need for a diversity of expertise, a structured process for selecting experts, and greater clarity regarding the methods by which expert consensus is achieved. The analysis indicates an urgent research agenda that can help strengthen the UK science advice system after Covid-19.
The manuscript discusses interfaces between academic and practical fields of Global Health and Planetary Health, shedding light on some critical perspectives of cumulative and synergistic causes of global crises, and effects on health and food security, on human rights, on migration, and on environment. Concepts of Global Health and Planetary Health and the path for the Sustainable Development Goals -SDG in the context of the Syndemy of Global Crisis, in particular the COVID-19 pandemic, are presented.
COVID-19 lessons highlight challenges of infectious diseases and pandemics of the crisis of food insecurity, and of climate emergency. The manuscript advocates for an innovative approach that simultaneously broader awareness of the interconnected problems and of their complex causes and calls for emancipatory knowledge to face urgent challenges for a transdisciplinary research agenda aiming to tackle enormous planetary problems brought by the Anthropocene. It calls for practical solutions, with examples of some nature-based. It highlights the need of a collective reflection on a viable path to promote changes for a more sustainable, equitable, and adaptive future, bridging gaps from Global and Planetary Health.
Global Health and Planetary Health: Perspectives for a transition to a more sustainable world
in Technology Assessment and Global Technology Governance
Forthcoming
Marko Monteiro et al.
This chapter is part of a cooperation involving the members of the Global Technology Assessment Network (https://globalta.technology-assessment.info/), a network of institutions working together to reflect on global forms of governing technologies. The chapter proposes principles for global governance of emerging bio risks and ways to increase resilience to withstand future risks.
The making of a Swedish strategy: How organizational culture shaped the Public Health Agency’s pandemic response
SSM – Qualitative Research in Health Volume 2, December 2022
Tobias Olofsson, Shai Mulinari, Maria Hedlund, Åsa Knaggård, Andreas Vilhelmsson
Several suggestions have been made as to why Sweden’s approach to managing the COVID-19 pandemic came to rely on a strategy based on voluntary measures. Two of the most prominent explanations for why the country chose a different strategy than many other countries have focused on micro- and macro-level factors, explaining the strategy either in terms of the psychologies of prominent actors or by pointing to particularities in Swedish constitutional law.
Supported by a qualitative analysis using interviews and text analysis, we argue that the Swedish strategy cannot be understood without paying attention to the meso-level and the organizations that produced the strategy. Moreover, we argue that to understand why one of the central organizations in Swedish pandemic management, the Public Health Agency, came to favor certain interventions, one must investigate the culture of production inside the organization and how it created precedents that led the Agency to approach pandemic management with a focus on balancing current and future health risks.
in Being Human During COVID-19 (Bristol University Press) 2022
Rokia Ball and Warren Pierce
When the UK government switched its COVID-19 strategy from mitigation to suppression on 17 March, it seemed a case of ‘new data, new policy’. News reports cited how modelling from Imperial College’s Centre for Global Infectious Disease projected between 410,000– 500,000 deaths, prompting the government to implement stringent lockdown policies, and upending the UK’s political economy. Unsurprisingly, given the stakes involved, public debates about government policies and their effects have been intense.
For example, the time taken for the UK to introduce a lockdown policy and the unequal effects on health and wellbeing. However, two broader questions regarding the relationship between science, politics and publics now demand reflection: how is science advice being formulated, and how is that advice being used to justify policy decisions in the public interest? We attempt to answer these questions by focusing on whether the models that lie at the heart of COVID-19 science can become ‘public objects’, helping to foster both public debate about policy and trust in the institutions that we rely on to make life-and-death decisions.
Legal and ethical issues of COVID-19 ‘Digital Contact Tracing’ measures in Taiwan
Taiwan Journal of Public Health 40(3): 332-345. DOI: 10.6288/TJPH.202106_40(3).109085
Yu-Ling Huang and Cheng-Chung Lo
COVID-19 has posed unprecedented challenges to governments and civil society worldwide. Before effective treatments and vaccines become available, nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), including digital contact tracing technologies, are critical for delaying or controlling the spread of COVID-19. This paper investigates the practices, discussions, and legal and ethical issues of the contact tracing measures imposed in Taiwan during the COVID-19 pandemic.
By analyzing official documents from the Ministry of Health and Welfare website, media reports, legal regulations, international organizations’ ethical guidelines, and research on contact tracing measures, this paper categorically presents the applications, effectiveness, and legal and ethical concerns of these measures in Taiwan. Results: Although the rates of confirmed cases and deaths from COVID-19 are low in Taiwan, the Electronic Fence of Surveillance, a digital contact tracing measure implemented by the National Health Command Center, was found to lack legal certainty. Some proactive deployments by public and private organizations that have used location-based services, the National Health Insurance system, and the center’s data on of the digital footprints of confirmed cases do not meet ethical and scientific validity standards. Oversight mechanisms have not been established, and public reflection has not been addressed. Conclusions: This paper argues that the choice of upholding individual privacy rights versus performing digital contact tracing is not binary. To make digital technologies part of measures against COVID-19, and future public health crises, it is crucial to include diverse experts not only of information technology and biomedicine, but also of epidemiology, public health, law, ethics, and social sciences, as well as civil organizations in the design, application, oversight, and evaluation of new public health technologies.
The Discontents of Truth and Trust in 21st Century America
Daedalus Forthcoming
Sheila Jasanoff
“Preparedness” Won’t Stop the Next Pandemic”
Boston Review December 8, 2021
Sheila Jasanoff
The COVID-19 pandemic has confounded the world’s expectations at every turn. It began in surprise, continued with chaos, and devolved into conspiracy theories. From a policy standpoint, it gave the lie to our prepandemic imaginations of order and control. Public health experts, after all, had warned of an outbreak for decades.
But despite its prominence among the grand global challenges that successive U.S. presidents were advised to take seriously, it still caught this nation and many others flatfooted. Nineteen months into the pandemic and counting, the balance sheet of losses and gains in the United States leans negative across public health, the economy, and democratic politics. How can we begin to make sense of a widely predicted crisis that, by late October 2021, had carried off nearly 5 million lives worldwide, stalled economies, and placed unprecedented strains on social ties and personal liberty?
Dataset: COVID-19 epidemic policy and events timeline (Sweden)
Data in Brief Volume 40, February 2022, 107698
Tobias Olofsson and Andreas Vilhelmsson
The Swedish approach to managing the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic has received significant attention in international scholarly work and press. For this dataset, we have reviewed governmental and media archives to build a detailed timeline that chronicles significant policies, interventions, and events in the Swedish management of COVID-19. The dataset contains summary descriptions of what took place, when it happened, and who the principal actors involved were. Links to primary sources are provided for each entry. Because of the level of detail and saturation, the dataset offers a detailed account of Swedish pandemic governance and will benefit anyone working on Swedish pandemic management or doing comparative work between Sweden and other jurisdictions.
Pinned Publication
