Social, Behavioral Scientists Eligible to Apply for NSF S-STEM Grants
Solicitations are now being sought for the National Science Foundation’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, and in an unheralded […]
COVID-19: Blood on Whose Hands?
Lessons will be learned from this pandemic and it is right that there should be inquiries to spell them out. It will not, however, be helpful to see this as a partisan exercise in blaming individuals for acting within the limits of what was possible in systems that others had designed for very different purposes.
Resisting the Biosecurity State
These are extraordinary times, and not just because we are coming through the greatest national trauma since the Second World War. The […]
Opinion: We Must Resist the Powerful Voices Arguing for Zero COVID
Do we treat the coronavirus as an ordinary risk of life, much as we do with the other 30 respiratory viruses that have infected humans throughout history? Or do we try to eliminate the virus from the UK altogether – the so-called Zero COVID approach?
No One Can Ensure Total Safety… We Must Fight Pandemic of FEAR
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.
We Must Learn to Live With the Virus – Just Like Samuel Pepys Lived With the Great Plague
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?
Coronavirus UK – Patrician Policymaking
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’.
Coronavirus UK – Is COVID-19 a Disease?
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.
Coronavirus UK – A Nasty Infection But Let’s Have a Sense of Proportion
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.
