…It may be a difficult moment for bioethicists to stand against the tide – but if bioethicists are not prepared to get going when the going gets tough, what is the point of the field? Are we obliged to agree with Nietzsche that philosophy is “most often a desire of the heart that has been… Read More »
The dust is settling on the UK House of Commons report, produced jointly by its Select Committees on health and on science and technology, about the initial handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Predictably, the government’s critics have used its 20/20 hindsight to argue that many lives would have been saved if only they had been… Read More »
…What I do want to highlight is that the Chinese state and people take TCM very seriously, that it has played a significant role in their pandemic response, and that you would really not know this from the mainstream Western media. Our understanding of the pandemic in China is framed by our own conceptions of… Read More »
A troubling turn in the public policy management of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the increasing tendency to justify interventions by assertions of scientific truth that bely the uncertainty of the evidence on which they are based. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more obvious than in the case of mandatory face masks in community settings… Nothing… Read More »
In the time BC (Before Covid), I used to dabble in the history of nursing. It was a privilege to be asked to endorse Florence Nightingale at Home by Paul Crawford and his colleagues. This is the capstone of a project to re-assess Miss Nightingale’s life and develop new materials that was intended to commemorate… Read More »
Former UK Prime Minister Theresa May spoke truth to power in the House of Commons last month. The Government, she said, was not leveling with the British people about three things:- • We were not going to eliminate or eradicate Covid-19. There would never be a time when there would never be a case of… Read More »
This is the first part of a much longer interview about my thinking on the Covid-19 pandemic and its management, drawing on my experience as a sociologist who has studied organizations and risk for almost fifty years! There are opportunities for the sort of detail, reflection and explicit use of sociology that are not usually… Read More »
As the pandemic enters its endgame, at least in the Global North, there are many demands to continue home-working, by those who can. This can be coupled with many signals of virtue, such as reducing commutes, limiting opportunities for infections to circulate or promoting work-life balance. Nice for those who can do it – but… Read More »
A puzzling feature of so many proposed exit strategies from the Covid-19 pandemic is the enthusiasm for the use of electronic or paper documents to demonstrate the immunity status of their holder. This might come from prior infection (immunity certificate) or from vaccination (vaccine passport)…. …In the context of an adult movie, information about the… Read More »
This is a recording of a webinar for the Royal Society of Medicine on Thursday 4 March 2021. Professor Dingwall was interviewed by Sir Simon Wessely about the way in which sociologists understood pandemics and why their contribution should matter more than it did. There was a particular focus on understanding pandemics as societal challenges… Read More »