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Open commentary

Reflections on trust and COVID-19: do politics, medicine and the environment need each other?

Authors
  • Alistair Cole orcid logo (Department of Government and International Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong)
  • Frederic Dutheil orcid logo (Preventive and Occupational Medicine, University Hospital of Clermont-Ferrand (CHU), Clermont-Ferrand, France)
  • Julien S. Baker orcid logo (Department of Sport, Physical Education and Health, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong)

This is version 1 of this article, the published version can be found at: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444/ucloe.000010

Abstract

This short article is centred on how trust can be a valuable resource for developing cognate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the medical and social sciences. Politics and medicine can learn from each other. Governments need to persuade individuals to adapt their behaviours, and such persuasion will be all the more convincing in that it is nested in social networks. Trust in government requires consistent (benevolent, performative and joined-up) explanations. The distinction between hard medical and soft social science blurs when patients/citizens are required to be active participants in combatting a pandemic virus.

Keywords: trust, environment, medical and social sciences, international comparison, transdisciplinarity, COVID-19, political science, policy and law

Rights: © 2020 The Authors.

2008 Views

Published on
27 Aug 2020
Peer Reviewed
License
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

 Open peer review from Dionysios Stivas

Review

Review information

DOI:: 10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-SOCSCI.AQTLSW.v1.RGJFFU
License:
This work has been published open access under Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0 , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Conditions, terms of use and publishing policy can be found at www.scienceopen.com .

Keywords: environment , transdisciplinarity , Covid 19 , Policy and law , medical and social science , international comparison , Trust , political science

Review text

A very well resourced and articulated article about the connection between medical and political sciences and trust in multiple levels.

Perhaps an example of how trust and confidence in the government defines heavily the level of cooperation of the general public with the Covid-19 measures would make the trust, confidence, cooperation model more understandable.

Or, perhaps the authors could also mention how the politicians in many countries involve medical experts to the announcement of the infections, deaths, measures. It looks like the medical experts are more trustful than the politicians. Facts and measures announced by medical experts are taken more seriously by the general public.



Note:
This review refers to round of peer review and may pertain to an earlier version of the document.

 Open peer review from Nicholas Ross Smith

Review

Review information

DOI:: 10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-SOCSCI.AXC88X.v1.RXTBXB
License:
This work has been published open access under Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0 , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Conditions, terms of use and publishing policy can be found at www.scienceopen.com .

Keywords: environment , transdisciplinarity , Covid 19 , Policy and law , medical and social science , international comparison , Trust , political science

Review text

It is to state the obvious to say that this piece is extremely timely. The topic of the article is of central importance to trying to think critically about how best to arrange technocratic responses to challenges like COVID19 (and also, future challenges that will emerge out of climate change). To my mind, this is an area which is under-researched and I think the authors here are doing a good job in getting the ball rolling on this - it is also a great strength that this collaboration is interdisciplinary as well.

The trust aspect the authors examine is interesting and the authors do a very good job of bringing in ideas from the extant literature. It is easy to follow and gives much food for thought throughout. Of course, this is not that substantive or rigorous a paper, but for the time, this is an appropriate (and likely will be well-received) piece.



Note:
This review refers to round of peer review and may pertain to an earlier version of the document.