Social Science Space

With this pandemic, argues Robert Dingwall, fear amplification has been policy, based on the advice of a particular group of behavioral scientists advising the United Kingdom’s government.

The reports from Britain’s hospitals in the last few days have been truly worrying. No one should doubt the reality […]

It is possible that we could abolish death by COVID, argues Robert Dingwall, by continuing the restrictions of 2020 indefinitely – the problem, of course, is that we would simply die from something else.

Robert Dingwall summons the writings of Georg Simmel to present ‘crucial arguments against the break-up of urban life that is envisioned by some contemporary Utopians: the case against the 15-minute city needs to be heard.’

What happens, asks Robert Dingwall, when governments attempt to impose a moral code on the everyday lives of citizens without the consent of those citizens?

Humanity has a long history of dealing with things like pandemics. What history shows us is that the only practicable interventions are social and behavioral. How can we slow the movement of the new infection through the population while medical science catches up with treatments or vaccines?

Robert Dingwall cites a short story from 1957 which highlights why the development of a vaccine needs to always keep an eye on its safety, no matter what the pressures are for its immediate release.

or 30 years, social scientists have been trying to educate scientific elites in the value of taking ordinary people with them rather than dismissing skepticism about science-based actions. This work has just gone out the window, argues Robert Dingwall.

The management of the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the hollowness of that alternative in policies that have been made by people with very narrow life experiences and imposed on others with whom there is, as Disraeli once said, ‘no intercourse and no sympathy’.

Having locked ourselves into a particular way of thinking and acting in relation to COVID-19, argues Robert Dingwall, it is very difficult for this to be questioned – but it must not go unchallenged if we are to balance the moral goals of medicine with the other moral goals that make up a good society.

Of course the government should have a Plan B for a second wave. But this might also be a moment to ask where pandemic management is taking us.

The UK government has regularly been denounced by many in the public health community for its absence of strategy in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of this criticism, however, reflects a simple dislike of the strategy or of the government that has authored it. On closer inspection, the UK government does have an intellectually coherent position – just one that is different from that preferred by many public health specialists and activists, and, to some extent, the biomedical community in general.