Science alone can’t heal a sick society

‘Science is a social process, and we all live amid the social soup of personalities, parties and power. The political dysfunction that holds America hostage also holds science hostage. Dr. Virchow wrote that “mass disease means that society is out of joint.” Society’s being out of joint means that epidemiological research is out of joint, because it exists inside the same society. This is not a new problem, but the dominant “follow the science” mantra misses the fact that the same social pathology that exacerbates the pandemic also debilitates our scientific response to it.

‘To restore faith in science, there must be faith in social institutions more broadly, and this requires a political reckoning. Of course one can cite many specific challenges for scientists: The wheels are coming off the peer review system, university research is plagued by commercialization pressures, and so on. But all of these are the symptoms, not the underlying disease. The real problem is simply that sick societies have sick institutions. Science is not some cloistered preserve in the clouds, but is buried in the muck with everything else. This is why, just eight days after his investigation in Upper Silesia, Dr. Virchow went to the barricades in Berlin to fight for the revolution.‘

Read here (New York Times, Sept 10, 2021)

The pandemic has erased entire categories of friendship

‘Close relationships were long thought to be the essential component of humans’ social well-being, but Granovetter’s research led him to a conclusion that was at the time groundbreaking and is still, to many people, counterintuitive: Casual friends and acquaintances can be as important to well-being as family, romantic partners, and your closest friends...[this is the group of friends the pandemic has erased].

[At this point]...there’s cause for optimism. As more Americans are vaccinated in the coming months, more people will be able to return confidently to more types of interactions. If the best historical analogue for the coronavirus outbreak is the 1918 flu pandemic, the Roaring ’20s suggest we’ll indulge in some wild parties. In any case, Rawlins doubts that many of the moderate and weak ties people lost touch with in the past year will be hurt that they didn’t get many check-in texts. Mostly, he predicts, people will just be so happy to see one another again.

‘All of the researchers I spoke with were hopeful that this extended pause would give people a deeper understanding of just how vital friendships of all types are to our well-being, and how all the people around us contribute to our lives—even if they occupy positions that the country’s culture doesn’t respect very much, such as service workers or store clerks. “My hope is that people will realize that there’s more people in their social networks that matter and provide some kind of value than just those few people that you spend time with, and have probably managed to keep up with during the break,” Sandstrom said. America, even before the pandemic, was a lonely country. It doesn’t have to be. The end of our isolation could be the beginning of some beautiful friendships.’

Read here (The Atlantic, Jan 28, 2021)

In a pandemic we learn again what Sartre meant by being free

‘The pandemic also teaches us about freedom in ways that go beyond Sartre’s discussion of the individual. Politically, using Isaiah Berlin’s distinction, we talk of the ‘negative liberty’ to go about our business without restraint, and the ‘positive liberty’ to do the things that give us the possibility to flourish and maximise our potential. For example, a society where there is no compulsory schooling gives parents the negative liberty to educate their children as they wish. But, generally speaking, this doesn’t give the child the positive liberty to have a decent education.

‘Over recent decades in the West, negative liberty has been in the ascendancy and positive liberty has been tarred with the brush of the nanny state. What we should have learned in 2020 is that without health services, effective regulation and sometimes strict rules, our negative freedom is useless and even sometimes destructive. Without state ‘interference’, many more lives would have been lost, jobs destroyed and businesses ruined. We now have an opportunity to reset the balance between negative and positive liberty...’

Read here (Psyche, Sept 30, 2020)

Impact of Covid-19 on women and children

‘The impacts of crises are never gender-neutral and COVID-19 is no exception. The pandemic has resulted in increased rates of violence against women and has exacerbated challenges in accessing justice. Women are losing their livelihoods faster than men.

‘Millions of women are assuming disproportionate responsibility for caregiving. Many women have found themselves unable to access contraception and other sexual and reproductive health services. UN experts predict that as many as 13 million more child marriages could take place over the next 10 years because of COVID-19 shutdowns of schools and family planning services combined with increasing economic challenges.’

Read here (IPS News, Sept 16, 2020)

The Covid silver linings playbook

• The first is that we are living through one of the most exciting and promising periods of medical invention and innovation in history. 
• Second, deeper cross-border private-sector collaboration, often outside the purview of governments, is fueling this process of scientific leapfrogging.
• Third, the economic disruptions resulting from the pandemic have fueled multiple private-sector efforts to collect and analyze a broader range of high-frequency data in domains extending far beyond medicine. 
• Fourth, the COVID-19 shock has raised our collective awareness and sensitivity to low-probability, high-impact “tail risks.”
• Fifth silver lining... The pandemic has led country after country to run a series of “natural experiments,” which have shed light on a host of issues that go well beyond health and economics.
• Finally, the crisis has required many companies to hold candid conversations about work-life balance, and to devise innovative solutions to accommodate employees’ needs.

Read here (Project Syndicate, Sept 15, 2020) 

Meet the generation changed by lockdown

“We should not trivialize [teenagers’] stressors or grief in the context of the larger issues playing out during this pandemic,” Beth Marshall, associate director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Adolescent Health, said during a Johns Hopkins faculty roundtable in May. “Their grief over what they are experiencing — or not getting to experience — is real.” But out of stagnation often comes transformation.

‘To be a teenager is to be in a state of constant growth and transition; to form values, priorities and plans that will affect your life for years to come. And for a generation of young adults who have seen their lives upended by a global pandemic and then witnessed their communities lit up by grassroots activism, this year might prove crucial in determining how they see the world and their home country as they grow up and gain power.’

Read here (Huffington Post, July 22, 2020)

The national humiliation we need

‘What’s the core problem? Damon Linker is on to a piece of it: “It amounts to a refusal on the part of lots of Americans to think in terms of the social whole — of what’s best for the community, of the common or public good. Each of us thinks we know what’s best for ourselves.”

‘I’d add that this individualism, atomism and selfishness is downstream from a deeper crisis of legitimacy. In 1970, in a moment like our own, Irving Kristol wrote, “In the same way as men cannot for long tolerate a sense of spiritual meaninglessness in their individual lives, so they cannot for long accept a society in which power, privilege, and property are not distributed according to some morally meaningful criteria”.’

Read here (New York Times, July 2, 2020)

US in the spring of the pandemic

‘The gnawing anger beneath the pandemic is that democracy itself is being rewired in our absence. The system has failed us, the system is guaranteed to go on failing us, but while we the people are out of the picture, others are making grand, world-altering decisions. The powerful are rewriting the social contract while we watch TV and console ourselves with booze and simple chores.’

Read here (Le Monde Diplomatique, June 2020)

To understand who’s dying of Covid-19, look to social factors like race more than preexisting diseases

‘The Sutter and MIT studies cast doubt on whether individual risk factors are as important as social determinants of health in affecting someone’s chances of contracting severe and even fatal Covid-19. “It should cause us to ask a different set of questions about what puts you at risk of hospitalization or death,” Schwalbe said.

‘More and more evidence is pointing to social determinants of risk, which puts the role of underlying health conditions in a new light. “Comorbidities are still used to blame people for how hard they are hit by Covid-19,” said Philip Alberti, senior director for health equity research at the AAMC. To reduce the U.S. death toll now that many states are seeing a new surge in cases, he said, “our response to this disease” must look beyond the strictly medical.’

Read here (STAT News, June 15, 2020)

Understanding Covid-19 risks and vulnerabilities among black communities in America: The lethal force of syndemics

‘Black communities in the United States are bearing the brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic and the underlying conditions that exacerbate its negative consequences. Syndemic theory provides a useful framework for understanding how such interacting epidemics develop under conditions of health and social disparity. Multiple historical and present-day factors have created the syndemic conditions within which black Americans experience the lethal force of Covid-19. These factors include racism and its manifestations (e.g., chattel slavery, mortgage redlining, political gerrymandering, lack of Medicaid expansion, employment discrimination, and health care provider bias). Improving racial disparities in Covid-19 will require that we implement policies that address structural racism at the root of these disparities.’

Read here (Annals of Epidemiology, Volume 47, July 2020, Pages 1-3, via Science Direct)

We have different attitudes toward social distancing, and it's straining relationships

‘The coronavirus isn't just threatening our health, it's threatening our relationships as we try to navigate how a socially distanced world should look -- something never done before. And now that states have replaced stay-at-home orders with various guidelines on reopening, there's more room for differing views on social distancing. These conflicts can be an opportunity for growth if we try to understand each other's mindset, according to psychologist Holly Parker, but that depends on both parties' willingness to embrace vulnerability.’

Read here (CNN, May 29, 2020)

Coronavirus is not an enemy rather a courier

‘The Dao philosophical and medicinal way of tackling Covid-19 has been effective in China and need to be widely adopted...

‘If we regard COVID-19 as an ecological crisis, it requires a brand new thinking, a comprehensive, organic thinking which treats COVID-19 as political, economic, philosophical, ethical, and psychological issue.

‘We recommend Dao thinking. According to Dao or process-relational thinking, everything is closely related to one another. The COVID-19 crisis is a result of many causes. This means that tackling COVID-19 should be carried out in a multi-faceted way. Therefore it will require everybody’s active participation, and everyone including scientists, economists, educators, philosophers, government officials, ordinary people should take some responsibilities. We should rethink our development model, our way of thinking, our way of living, our way of consumption, our way of production, our dietary habits, and our education system, etc. All of them are closely related to the cause and cure of COVID-19.’

Read here (MR Online, Apr 23, 2020)