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Objectives: Both the political appetite for a science-based coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) policy and its acceptability to the public are little understood, at a time of sharp distrust not only of governments but also of scientists and their journals' review practices. We studied the case of France, where the independent Scientific Council on COVID-19 was appointed by President Macron on March 12, 2020., Study Design: We conducted a survey on a representative sample of the French adult population., Methods: Our data were collected by the French Institute of Public Opinion using a self-administered online questionnaire. This was completed by a sample of 1016 people stratified to match French official census statistics for gender, age, occupation, and so on. We conducted statistical analysis using Python (Pandas-SciPy-Statsmodels) with Chi-squared and Wilcoxon rank-sum tests to control for statistical significance., Results: Intense media coverage has given the council a very high public profile, with three respondents out of four (73%) having heard about it. Perceptions are positive but complex. French citizens expect science to be important in political decision-making. Four of five (81.5%) want political decisions, in general, to be based on scientific knowledge. But one in two (55%) says that the government has not relied enough on science and only 36% are satisfied with the government's crisis management to date. Although most feel that the council has a legitimate advisory role even in situations of uncertainty (only 15% disagree), it is not perceived as fully independent. Only 44% think that it directly represents the scientific community, and only one of three people considers it completely independent from the government (39%) and the pharmaceutical industry (36%)., Conclusions: Our study confirms that while the transparency of scientific advice is important, it alone cannot ensure public confidence in political decision-making. We suggest that efforts made today to instill a 'science-savvy' public culture-one that allows the complex articulation between scientific knowledge, uncertainty, and political decision-making to be understood and accounted for would greatly benefit evidence-based policy in future crises., (Copyright © 2021 The Royal Society for Public Health. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The UK government response to COVID-19 has been heavily criticised. We report witnesses' perceptions of what has shaped UK policies and how these policies have been received by healthcare workers. Such studies are usually affected by hindsight. Here we deploy a novel prospective approach to capture real-time information. We are historians, social scientists and biomedical researchers who study how societies cope with infectious disease. In February 2020 we began regular semi-structured calls with prominent members of policy communities, and health care professionals, to elicit their roles in, and reactions to, the pandemic response. We report witnesses' perceptions that personal protective equipment (PPE) stocks were too small, early warnings have not led to sufficiently rapid policy decisions, and a lack of transparency is sapping public trust. Significant successes include research mobilisation. The early experiences and reactions of our witnesses suggest important issues for investigation, notably a perception of delay in decision making., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many governments have resorted to scientific advisory bodies to aid in public health decision-making. What then has been the public's perception of those new structures of scientific advice? In this article, we draw on a survey conducted in November 2020 among a representative sample of the French adult population (n  = 1,004) designed specifically to explore public perceptions of the dedicated Covid-19 Scientific Council created in March 2020 and of scientific advice in general. After only 8 months, three-quarters of French people said they had heard of it, but only a quarter had a positive opinion about its usefulness. Despite the diversity of perceptions of what scientific advice is and should be, it appeared that scientific advice bodies are perceived as useful mainly by a public already largely supportive of the delegation of the management of public life to the government and public institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution, I present emergent analysis of a preoccupation with managing COVID-19 through border control, among non-Governmental public health actors and commentators. Through a reading of statements, tweets, and interviews from the 'Independent Sage' group – individually and collectively – I show how the language of border control, and of maintaining immunity within the national boundaries of the UK, has been a notable theme in the group's analysis. To theorize this emphasis, I draw comparison with the phenomenon of 'green nationalism', in which the urgency of climate action has been turned to overtly nationalistic ends; I sketch the outlines of what I call 'viral nationalism,' a political ecology that understands the pandemic as an event occurring differentially between nation states, and thus sees pandemic management as, inter alia, a work of involuntary detention at securitized borders. I conclude with some general remarks on the relationship between public health, immunity, and national feeling in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite strong expertise and a sophisticated scientific advisory system, the UK's response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been, and continues to be, weak in terms of preventing death and illness, and damage to the economy. This article argues that an important reason for this failure has been that the policies of the UK government have at critical times failed to take adequate account of scientific evidence, while at the same time attempts have been made to blame scientists for resulting policy failures. This paper analyses the role of scientific advice in addressing Covid-19 in the UK and draws three lessons for how such expertise can be better deployed in the future. It argues that: (1) Government scientific advisors and advisory bodies should be more independent of political influence and interference; (2) Government scientific advisors should be empowered to challenge misrepresentation and misuse by decision-makers of the scientific evidence, and undermining of public-health policies; and (3) Government scientific advice should be more transparent and advisors should engage more proactively with the public. Acting on these lessons will be important for ongoing handling of the current crisis, for the current UK Covid-19 Public Inquiry, and for the UK's preparedness for future crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immense uncertainty and the need for drastic interventions cause politicians to rely heavily on scientific advice for underpinning or legitimating their COVID-19 decision-making. This paper explores the role of scientific advice in this policy field in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK. It shows that scientific advice is based on the disciplinary, mainly medical, backgrounds of advisors but is also influenced by social and economic values, which are core to what politicians find important. During the pandemic a growing gap between scientific advice and political decisions is observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a preliminary analysis of the advice provided by the UK government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) held between 22 January and 23 March 2020 in response to the emerging coronavirus pandemic. Drawing on the published minutes of the group's meetings, the article examines what was known and not known, the assumptions and working practices that shaped their work, and how this knowledge was reflected in the decisions made by the government. In doing so, the article critically examines what it means for policy making to be 'led by the science' when the best available science is provisional and uncertain. Using ideas of 'externality' and 'evidential significance', the article argues that the apparent desire for high levels of certainty by both scientists and political decision-makers made early action impossible as the data needed were not, and could not be, available in time. This leads to an argument for changes to the institutions that provide scientific advice based on sociologically informed expectations of science in which expert judgement plays a more significant role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the SAGE minutes and other documents, I consider the wider lessons for norms of scientific advising that can be learned from the UK’s initial response to coronavirus in the period January–March 2020, when an initial strategy that planned to avoid total suppression of transmission was abruptly replaced by an aggressive suppression strategy. I introduce a distinction between “normatively light advice”, in which no specific policy option is recommended, and “normatively heavy advice” that does make an explicit recommendation. I argue that, although scientific advisers should avoid normatively heavy advice in normal times in order to facilitate democratic accountability, this norm can be permissibly overridden in situations of grave emergency. SAGE’s major mistake in early 2020 was not that of endorsing a particular strategy, nor that of being insufficiently precautionary, but that of relying too heavily on a specific set of “reasonable worst-case” planning assumptions. I formulate some proposals that assign a more circumscribed role to “worst-case” thinking in emergency planning. In an epilogue, I consider what the implications of my proposals would have been for the UK’s response to the “second wave” of late 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on several recent cases to analyse the particular challenges for experts who are called to provide scientific advice under time-critical circumstances. It uses the notion of civic epistemologies (Jasanoff, 2005) [1] to consider the testing of knowledge claims in time-pressured situations. It argues that an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates diverse perspectives is needed to manage these high-stakes crises. This poses a major challenge: time-critical crises do not allow for the identification of key experts and of stakeholders – as is typically the case for the assembling of expert advisory groups for non-time-critical issues. These issues have again arisen in the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, but not for the first time, and flexible cross-case, cross-discipline learning provides a means of enhancing resilience for future emergencies. There are some critical lessons to be learned in this crisis from other situations involving high stakes and rapid response. This paper uses its case studies to build a framework for analysing the roles of experts in emergencies, and suggests that understanding the power dynamics inherent in these situations is critically important in the context of the Sendai Framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]