COVID-19 has created a communication context for scientists, researchers and policy makers that is global, uncertain and rapidly evolving. At the center of this, political leaders around the world are attempting to navigate their jurisdictions towards solutions to the pandemic, drawing on advice and evidence from a broad range of experts. But what happens when differing forms of expertise and evidence offer competing understandings of both the critical problems and potential solutions? And what happens when the public – who are critical to authorizing proposed solutions and enacting societal responses – observe these disagreements? This piece examines this critical tension between science and society, and suggests approaches to communication that may help mitigate the consequences of such disputes.
Public communication in the age of COVID-19 has been dominated by a narrative of ‘science as savior’. The UK Government, for example, has regularly asserted that it is ‘following the science’ as it enacts various measures such as closing schools, urging social distancing or lifting lockdown restrictions. Similar rhetoric can be seen in the US, where former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority Rick Bright has argued that “science, not politics or cronyism, must lead the way to combat this deadly virus”.[i]
Science can – and should – contribute to pandemic solutions. Yet political rhetoric that privileges science above all other forms of knowledge has limited the communication landscape unduly and proven detrimental to public reasoning about pandemic response and recovery. Three key issues with this rhetoric are worth exploring.
First, the science pertinent to COVID-19 is by its very nature tentative, contestable and multifaceted, rarely providing unambiguous pathways for policy action. While science may strive to be objective, it is dealing with a complex phenomenon that cannot be reduced to a set of simple facts.[ii] Rhetorical assertions of ‘following the science’ mask those inherent uncertainties.
Second, there is no one central science or academic discipline that should dominate policy action in regard to COVID-19. Researchers from many disparate disciplines have important understandings to contribute. Those with pertinent lived experience and embedded expertise have essential knowledge to add to discussion and decision-making. Lockdowns have exposed deep inequalities and created new ones, few of which are understandable - better yet solvable - by the simple application of one strand of scientific evidence.[iii] Failure to look beyond ‘the science’ marginalizes and devalues these other perspectives.
Third, assertions of ‘following the science’ mask the crucial role values play in any decision making, whether individual or collective, personal, scientific or governmental. Decisions cannot be made without values. Yet asserting that we are simply ‘following the science’ allows the values underpinning such decisions to remain opaque or ambiguous, and shielded from critique. Differing societal aspirations and values appear disregarded by such arguments, which can lead to conflict.
Protesters have gathered in many countries (for example in the United States, Lebanon and India) to protest the impacts of isolation restrictions on their lives and livelihoods. While some of these protesters may be inspired by a conspiratorial disbelief in COVID-19 pandemic in general, it is likely that many accept the widely held understandings of the causes of the pandemic, but prioritize different values when assessing the acceptability of the personal impact of lockdowns.
The ways in which decisions are made, and how they are communicated, have significant implications for how people respond to them. This applies in all circumstances, but especially in a highly constrained COVID-19 world. We suggest three different ways of approaching COVID-19 communication to overcome these identified issues.
First, we need to embrace multiple expertise sources. When science-related phenomena such as COVID-19 have such potent real-world ramifications, diverse kinds of expertise are required to manage and mitigate them, including deep understandings of social phenomena and expertise founded on lived experience. The racist responses to a disease originating in China, or the ‘freedom-first’ protests in the US, can be considered manifestations of Sandman’s[iv] social equation of risk, where risk equals hazard plus outrage, with outrage reflecting people’s emotional reaction to the hazard should it occur. It is these perceptions and expressions of risk that reveal our values, assumptions and priorities.
In a pandemic situation, reactions of fear are expected – and reasonable – to a point. The way we communicate about a crisis will contribute to shaping these reactions, in conjunction with people’s pre-existing experiences and beliefs. Understanding that combination means not only being careful how we communicate about a disease, but also anticipating how different groups of people are likely to respond. If large or influential sectors of the population already harbor simmering racism, then racism is what we can expect, and we should pre-empt our responses to it. But identifying such tendencies – and how to work when communicating in such contexts – is not the province of epidemiologists and virologists. Scientists alone offer only one aspect of the expertise required to provide advice to decision-makers in these complicated environments. The incorporation of social scientific expertise is essential for effective crisis communication.
Second, we must be transparent about values. This includes the values that underpin our individual and organizational scientific work, and the decisions being made on behalf of society. Science is a social activity “no different in [its] enrollment of human passions, interests, and material resources than any other mode of collective human behavior”.[v] Scientific knowledge is not produced in a vacuum; it is messy and multifaceted, bringing together myriad resources, sources and perspectives. Crucially, the processes of scientific inquiry necessarily involve value-based decisions and assumptions. Social and political values will “legitimately influence science” after the usual considerations of rigor have been considered.[vi]
Argyrous[vii] argues that those affected by a policy should be involved in assessments of what works and the evidence to support such a conclusion made available to all it affects. In the global context of COVID-19 this may well be impossible in practice. For there to be any hope of success, pertinent and contextually appropriate expert advice of all types must be incorporated. For example, the varying responses to government COVID-19 actions by publics around the world illustrate the clash between diverse individual and societal values, regardless of what the most recent and robust scientific evidence may suggest.
Those with the power to make decisions that affect society as a whole must recognize this comes with an expectation – at least in democracies – of transparency and accountability. But there is a fundamentally pragmatic reason for this: instilling and maintaining trust. This is being demonstrated in real time in New Zealand’s widely lauded efforts via the activities of their bi-partisan parliamentary Epidemic Response Committee, established in March 2020 to ensure accountability and transparency of government decisions.
In addition to accountability through external oversight, different countries demonstrate varying degrees of epidemiological data transparency. Countries such as Australia publish daily updates not just on new cases and deaths, but also on the number of tests performed and proportion of positive tests, number of people who have recovered, and number of individuals admitted to a hospital or in a critical condition.[viii] However, some countries are less forthcoming; for instance, there are reports of discrepancies in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases that the Indonesian central government is reporting and that regional administrations are sharing.[ix] The Iranian government has recently decided to no longer announce the number of confirmed cases/deaths in each province in public briefings, seemingly to control the narrative of health conditions across the country.[x]
It is not just COVID-19 statistics that countries have to be transparent about. There is also a need for transparency and accountability about how epidemiological data were obtained and calculated and how they are used to build simulations that guide policy decisions.[xi] This is highlighted by the variability among countries in testing strategies, and in the definition and computation of certain epidemiological parameters such as death rate and deaths due to COVID-19.[xii] Processes typically not discussed or communicated in detail in public are now subject to greater scrutiny. For example, some public health experts have called for modeling not only the spread of infection but also the impact of lockdown.[xiii]
When it comes to trust, intentions matter. Being transparent about processes and decisions, and the values and assumptions underlying them, will almost certainly not make matters simpler. But often it is simply the act of being transparent that makes a difference. Transparency and accountability require decision makers to be honest and open about uncertainty rather than making bald assertions that ‘these are the facts’. A recent study found that communicating uncertainty around facts and numbers is not detrimental to public perceptions of issues or trust in the communicator.[xiv] Uncertainty is harder to accept than a single solution, but the failure of a single solution to materialize is harder still.
Finally, we need to accept that while simple and consistent slogans are powerful marketing tools, they may not be the best fit for purpose. The circumstances under which COVID-19 actions are occurring are messy, contestable, challenging and driven by multiple, sometimes competing, agendas. Actions under these circumstances must address matters at the individual, local, regional, national and international scale and in a very real sense, do so simultaneously. To hope that one solution, or a single simple best path, will emerge is understandable but utterly unrealistic, especially as myriad types of relevant and robust evidence exist. A key way to improve decision-making processes, and acknowledge the breadth of relevant evidence, is to incorporate explicit assumption identification and testing into processes concerning evidence gathering and evaluating, and subsequent decision-making.
If science simply ‘told’ us that socio-economic restrictions were temporarily needed to preserve public health, then science would also tell us when it is safe to lift these restrictions and return to normal. But COVID-19 demonstrates the limits of this narrative. Science alone cannot tell us how to negotiate differences of expert opinion, address uncertainties and inequalities, mitigate economic downturn or imagine a post-pandemic order. It is meaningless to try and determine what constitutes the best possible evidence, better yet actions, when underlying perspectives and values, and their consequent influence on decisions, are not considered and communicated overtly. Truths that serve public interest emerge from a reasoned engagement with diverse epistemic, social and value judgments. Science has a role to play, but only within the societal context it serves. Communication of the science should reflect this.
References and notes:
Acknowledgements: Funding: No funding to declare.
Author contributions: All authors contributed to the conceptualization of the piece and writing of the original draft. MM, RL, WG and SR contributed to the writing (review and editing), with all authors reviewing the final draft. MM managed project administration.
Competing interests: No competing interests to declare.
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