In England, a new scheme for collating and sharing General Practitioners’ data has faced resistance from various quarters and has been deferred twice. While insufficient communication and ambiguous safeguards explain the widespread dissatisfaction expressed by the public and experts, we argue how dwindling public trust can be the most damaging variable in this picture - with implications not only for this scheme, but for any future project that aims to mobilise health data for medical research and innovation. We also highlight the indispensability of deliberative public engagement on the values being prioritised in health data initiatives, the significance of securing social license in addition to legal assurances, and the lessons in it of global pertinence.
In this article, we symmetrically explore the political underpinnings and connections of pharmaceutical drugs during the COVID-19 pandemic. We illustrate some different and shifting dynamics of expert-lay interplay, competing knowledge claims in politically charged environments, as well as actions and actors that can bring drugs to prominence. Focusing on three drugs, ivermectin, remdesivir, and Coronil, we offer three axes on which they can be apprehended within political logics: (a) ivermectin as a “populist drug” in the United States, (b) remdesivir as an “establishment drug” in the United States, and (c) Coronil as a “nationalist drug” in India. These three pharmaceuticals were politicized, and perhaps more surprising, politics became pharmaceuticalized. Trust in these treatments was intimately related to articulations of the threats posed by the pandemic and the best ways of addressing them, both manipulated politically by relatively powerful actors.
In 1863, Russian philosopher, journalist, and literary critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky published a novel titled What Is to Be Done?, (1863 [1989]), widely considered as a manifesto for a new social order. It further spawned a variety of tracts reflecting diverse responses, including those from Dostoevsky (1864Dostoevsky ( [1993), Tolstoy (1886Tolstoy ( [1991), and Lenin (1902Lenin ( [1987). It is these rejoinders that Chernyshevsky's novel garnered that make his invocation relevant to this essay. Each of these responses-embedded within distinct ideological perspectives-represented attempts to understand and describe reality and offered designs to challenge and reshape the forces that
Ana Delgado (Ed.) (2016), Technoscience and Citizenship: Ethics and Governance in the Digital Society. Switzerland: Springer, 189 pp., ₹9,039, ISBN: 9783319324128 (Hardcover).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.