Pandemic Modeling, Good and Bad

Northcott, Robert

doi:10.5195/pom.2022.79

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…For an extended discussion of spin, see Manson (2012). xxiii For a discussion of pandemic modelling, see Northcott (2022). xxiv As Wynia (2007) argues, "lack of trust will breed both fear and non-adherence" (6).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Health Officials Should Almost Always Tell the Truth

Director

2023

J Applied Philosophy

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One of the lessons of the COVID‐19 pandemic is that the lay public relies immensely on the knowledge of public health officials. At every phase of the pandemic, the testimony of public health officials has been crucial for guiding public policy and individual behavior. The reason is simple: public health officials know a lot more than you and I do about public health. As lay people, we rely on experts. This seems straightforward. But the COVID‐19 pandemic has shown that public health officials seem undecided as to what, precisely, their role is; are they providing the public information as it presents itself, or are they informing the public in a way that produces a desired or optimal outcome? In this article, I answer the following question: what are public health officials morally obligated to tell the public? As I see it, these are the main options: (1) public health officials should tell the full truth, regardless of outcome; or (2) they should tell partial truths or lies that are aimed to promote a socially optimal outcome. My answer to this question is that public health officials are only allowed to lie under very narrow and rare conditions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Health Officials Should Almost Always Tell the Truth

Director

2023

J Applied Philosophy

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“…In sum, the proposed organismic systems medicine provides a conceptual framework to develop a robust medical and public health system that can prevent or at least attenuate future pandemics by extending the focus from an EBCM that incorporates strictly the empirical to an OSCM that includes not only the empirical, but also clinical practice and theoretical concepts and models as other pathways for providing evidence (Fuller 2021;Northcott 2022;Nyabadza et al 2021;Parkkinen et al 2018). Finally, our proposed OSCM involves not just focal mechanistic models, which usually neglect contextual conditions, but also systemic conceptions of pathological functions, including respiratory dysfunction, hyperinflammation, and so on (Tretter et al 2021;Tretter et al 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Evidence-Based Corona Medicine to Organismic Systems Corona Medicine

Marcum

Tretter

2023

philmed

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The Covid-19 pandemic has challenged both medicine and governments as they have strived to confront the pandemic and its consequences. One major challenge is that evidence-based medicine has struggled to provide timely and necessary evidence to guide medical practice and public policy formulation. We propose an extension of evidence-based corona medicine to an organismic systems corona medicine as a multilevel conceptual framework to develop a robust concept-oriented medical system. The proposed organismic systems corona medicine could help to prevent or mitigate future pandemics by transitioning to a bifocal medicine that extends an empirical evidence-based medicine to a theory-oriented organismic systems medicine.

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“…Robert Northcott (2022) evaluates the strategies employed by two Covid-19 models produced by Imperial College London, and argues for the centrality of a missed distinction between "contextual" and "master-model" strategies. This distinction crosscuts familiar distinctions between types of models, and between causal and noncausal interpretations.…”

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confidence: 99%

Philosophical Perspectives on Covid-19

Broadbent

Fuller

2022

philmed

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The Covid-19 pandemic is a generation-defining health crisis. For philosophy of medicine, it casts familiar problems in a new light, while generating new questions about modeling, policy, evidence, values, and expertise. In this issue of Philosophy of Medicine, readers will find a special section of research papers devoted to Covid-19. This section arose from a fourday series of events (online, of course) running 10-13 May 2021, organized in partnership with the Institute for the Future of Knowledge at the University of Johannesburg and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.In the first of the resulting articles to be published, Maria Cristina Amoretti and Elisabetta Lalumera (2022) critically review the science and limitations of the reproduction number (R) used in pandemic modeling and policy.Lucie White, Philippe van Basshuysen, and Mathias Frisch (2022) defend the initial imposition of lockdown in the UK in 2020 by examining the role of uncertain evidence and poorly constrained epidemiological models in public policy. Their important

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Pandemic Modeling, Good and Bad

Cited by 6 publications

References 18 publications

Public Health Officials Should Almost Always Tell the Truth

Public Health Officials Should Almost Always Tell the Truth

From Evidence-Based Corona Medicine to Organismic Systems Corona Medicine

Philosophical Perspectives on Covid-19

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