 Good afternoon everyone. My name is Mila Nussela. I'm a research associate at Uni Wider and the chair of this fireside chat. So welcome everyone. So a few points. This chat takes about 20 minutes and after the opening words and the introduction to the topic everyone in the audience is most welcome to join the discussion. So you can either ask for permission to share your insights live by clicking the blue square on your right and asking permission to join or you can write the comments to the Q&A tab on the session on the side. So today we'll discuss the geography of the public response and understanding of the science for COVID-19. So the questions that we are discussing today and seeking to find answers are the following. So we know that there are great differences geographically in how and where people and governments have followed scientific advice. So why is this so? And why has science not shaped policy as well as one might have hoped? Is there for example a divide between global north and global south? Or how all kinds of reasons? But without further ado it's a great pleasure for me to welcome Professor David Holm to this fireside chat. He is a professor of development studies at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. And I think he has been interested for a longer time on this topic and is happy to share his views I think and his findings so far here. So one welcome David. Floris yours. Thank you very much. Okay it's very warm in the UK, the fireside chat I'm melting but anyway thanks very much for coming to this session and apologies for the very long-winded title we've got there but this is something which has interested me over the years not with COVID-19 but the way in which politics and technical analysis interact and many technical people are just frustrated that the advice doesn't get taken they sometimes say it's all politics but very rarely is it all politics. Usually politicians even very populist politicians listen towards technical analysis and scientists are are saying and so I think it's very important issue because if we're involved in technical analysis and we want our work to impact on policy then we have to think of these different strange lenses through which technical knowledge and advice proceeds. I became very interested in this during lockdown because of my personal experience I was locked down in New Zealand actually in Auckland when the lockdown occurred and that meant I spent two months there and if you're ever going to be locked down for a pandemic be in Auckland in New Zealand and what I witnessed there watching New Zealand television was very competent government listening to the science helping to link the public to that knowledge and explaining to the public the way in which policy was going to use or not use that science and helping the public to understand that we didn't really know what was happening in a pandemic that it was emerging knowledge so we we'd have to be taking decisions not knowing what was happening. A week later I came back to the UK and for the first time in my life I was truly horrified I felt privileged because when I come back to the UK there's law and order I have a pension the roads work the phones usually work but I found chaos compared to New Zealand. In a way very mixed government competence a very good civil service sometimes being listened to sometimes not being listened to sometimes with people like Dominic Cummings a political advisor sitting in on a scientific meeting very strange and looking in a way at the science of the pandemic as it emerged our government Boris Johnson's government was looking at it from the public relations perspective how do we listen to what the scientists are telling us and get a spin on it that makes it sound as though what we're doing is right and that might work it was confused I think it frightened the public particularly as the mortality rate went up and the infection rates went up and that was an incredible contrast this competence in New Zealand this sort of chaos sometimes getting it right but quite often just confusing the scene. The other TV channel I tended to watch was CNN when I was in New Zealand and there one saw completing competence one saw a government that was contesting science a president who knew better than the whole of the medical establishment all knowledge to date a genius in his own words who clearly could diagnose what the problem was and knew that it was flu and we'd all get over it that led to incredible confusion in public understanding really fueled public misunderstanding of the pandemic and I think which has left a big legacy legacy of people who still think that Trump is right an amazing legacy in the evangelical churches which seem to have got very confused about how they relate to scientific knowledge and in the whole republican party which appears to be able to ignore science and so I just thought what is happening what's happening in these countries what's happening in developing countries and so as I've looked around then I think we can see that there are these complicated patterns whether we're looking in high income countries or whether we're looking in lower middle income or low income countries. If one looks for the New Zealand model then definitely originally it was Vietnam. Vietnam really geared up closed habits border with China got a good test and trace system running and planned amazingly for it. I think they're having some problems now but they certainly managed to avoid the first two waves. Senegal has done incredibly well building on existing knowledge it had tried to avoid Ebola and had set up a pandemic monitoring center and that went into action when the pandemic came along and it's managed the pandemic pretty well for a relatively poor country with real problems with with communications. If one looks for the chaotic the sort of UK model of behavior then I think that might be India where the Modi government has switched and had a very fierce lockdown without thinking through the consequences the informal sector failed to get the oxygen supplies that were going to be needed by its middle class that could afford privately to buy oxygen and just generally sometimes got some things right but sometimes got them wrong and if one looks for incompetence then it was really Brazil one needed to look to so we've got Bolsonaro to see the similarities with Trump and a government that believed that the scientists were wrong you just don't need to listen to the scientists you just make it up as you go along and you'll be okay. The fascinatingly I mean certainly the India and Brazil are both in the sort of democratic and election camp and in those we have this chaotic and this incompetent model and that. So I've been watching TV what's my analysis very quickly of this TV well the first thing is that certainly any idea that we've got some global north and global south I'll talk about this a bit later in the closing session that we have the old international development is not right here there is really competent response in high-income countries in what we used to hold the north and in low and low middle-income countries what we used to call the south but there is also chaos and there is also real incompetence so I think yeah our north south divide really doesn't work on this the experience is mixed at different levels in that and the second one which is clear is that it's not actually democracy or autocracy and democratic theory would say well you know politicians are transparent they're accountable they have to try to get it right they can't have large numbers of people die they can't have the economy closed down and not take some responsibility for good decisions or bad decisions but that doesn't seem to be the case and in both democracies and autocracies one seems to have political processes which can help get it right or which can help get it wrong and a lot of this depends on the public understanding of science what the political leaders think the public understand and how they try to shape that that understanding so it's not serious research it is but something which deeply interests me and pretty what interests me now is the legacies that these legacies certainly with Trump they continue very strongly in the USA with the belief in science really undermined in the country which has the great greatest scientific analytical capacity in China science has been followed much more and there hasn't been that public undermining so we may see major systematic changes if countries that used to be guided by science are now misguided I think I've probably said enough Miller to set the ball around thank you very much this was a good synthesis revealing some of the also emergent patterns maybe that we see here so I think we could next well into into a little discussion about what could remain possible why is then behind this be why has science not shaped policy as well as one might have hoped why do we see these great differences would you like to start or shall I look at please you proceed now okay thank you so I was thinking of all these reasons that came into my mind while mind storming this as well as kind of our previous a little preparatory discussion over the email and I was thinking maybe one could brought these explanations that we could discuss in detail in a while into into two groups one is to do with the scientific knowledge so the knowledge everything that's around knowledge so levels of human capital state public investment in science inclusion of science in decision making previous direct experience accrued from controlling infectious diseases and the kind of overall crisis of knowledge that has emerged through the pandemic and the second set would be to do with the power and the trust and the politics so we have the reasons like trust in states and government the government emphasis on on maybe prioritizing economy or you know health the liberalist trust based approach of Sweden or the libertarians who champion individual freedom the bodily autonomy or the history of medical racism or political polarization and populism and and the strong political identity which causes them political irrationality and and and without the scientific curiosity weak support from traditional leaders or religious leaders misinformation and social media of course so maybe we could go deeper into these reasons is there something that you perhaps yeah I think you've I mean you've you've sketched that very well and certainly thinking of the nature of the scientific knowledge and the sort of the processes around creating it and then the the power and trust in politics does that help us to think on this and certainly I mean what would be interesting is that if one looked at human capital I suppose in first of all in a general sense then it is intriguing that in the USA which has very high levels of education then in fact you know the the actual the trust in science and the use of knowledge was so limited whereas in Senegal which has a much less developed educational system than actually science has been used better by the politicians and the populations seem to have been able to come in and not try to negotiate something different um I mean obviously when one starts to think more broadly about the processes around the pandemic then those countries that have incredibly high levels of human of specialized human capital have been able to get onto the vaccine and in a way that's that's created the possibility for them maybe to escape is the wrong word to to to to to to have a less severe impact in terms of infections and in terms of mortality though interestingly a lot of that has also depended on your second point the politics and some countries like the UK actually took a good decision and contracted for excessive amounts of vaccines from everybody other parts of the world initially the EU were more cautious and wanted to know whether the medicine worked before they said they'd buy it and that made it more difficult to get access to them but there is that state investment in in research is is clearly very important but again in the USA that's turned out to be important for the production of the vaccines not for the public understanding and with the USA has as one would expect being able to get very involved in developing the vaccines in producing them in being able to distribute them after initial hiccups and that and clearly it is much more difficult for any of the low-income or lower middle-income countries to at all engage with the actual identification of the vaccine processes though interestingly if you take the science into technology it is interesting that India is absolutely foundational to most of the inputs and that wherever you're producing the vaccine whether it's in Europe or the UK or in the USA or in China quite often you're dependent upon supply chains that go into India or go into China to get the the ingredients that are going certainly the previous experience one seems to have worked but I think there's probably a really interesting study for someone to do though looking at the West African states and looking at the fact that in a way all of them had a big fright with Ebola all of them had a reason and many countries have been looking at pandemic possibilities but it seems to be yeah maybe a meteorite will hit us it's it's that sort of level but when they have that Ebola risk and had the problems and had the exposures and 10,000 people died then it looks as though some of the West African countries may have performed better than the others so interestingly I think if one looks across Africa West Africa has still in relative terms escaped COVID friends in Ghana tells me it's not too bad whereas in Uganda and South Africa and Malawi and Zimbabwe the news all seems to be very very bad so previous experience certainly seems to be very important on that I mean do you want to come back and elaborate? Yeah it's an eco eco when I start taking out the muting but just to add also to that point like the Sierra Leone kind of experience from the the previous like the Ebola and and all this sort of also raised the other voices saying that okay they were very early on starting with all these restrictions and people were complying very well but then there's a toll for the poor so so there's also this literature that came recently about okay was then the toll actually too high for that for the poor just to add there and certainly I mean as with most things in life poor people and those who are disadvantaged have been disadvantaged with the pandemic and have tended to have occupations and livelihoods that require to expose themselves and get least access to vaccines but interestingly what moves on to that political framing so much of the early political framing was actually wrong then it was presented as we have to choose between lives and livelihoods we either go for the health or we go for maintaining the economy but I think the data increasingly shows that it's not either or it's both and if you manage to deal with the pandemic on a health basis well as in Singapore as in Vietnam as in China as in South Korea then you didn't have a big hit on your GDP if you didn't as in Peru as in Brazil as in Colombia I think Latin America really somehow got this wrong then you have a big hit on your GDP and you have a lot of deaths as well and so it's interesting the way that the the politics to make the dialogue presented it as either or when no it was both and you can avoid both or you can get really clobbered by both exactly it's a good valid point and now that we have discussed for a little while what do you think if we take some questions from the questions and answers so we have Salam al-Badi would would would you like to um can I see these um Mila you're breaking up a little bit so um Salam if you're still here if you'd like to come on stage to ask your question just click on the top right and I've lost sound on you Mila you in uh Mila's just gonna update her browser team um David you can also let's see there's also if Lauri Hamer would like to come on to the stage to ask your question you can also do that otherwise David you can see them which is of technology I don't know who can hear who I'm back good I think the sound is working again so um did the person who posed the question did the um shall I try and invite to the discussion somehow perhaps I'll read it out loud and the um so question is do you think that the United States to some extent has dealt with some racism with China at the political level when the virus has called the Chinese virus this is the question first question Mila Lumie are we still uh Lumie is gone I think she's refreshing her browser because she started to sound like from the outer space so now she's coming back I'm a technophobe and you're adding to my technophobia no no I just went away because this is your fireside chat not mine Mila maybe your sound was fine to me um so it didn't seem that anybody wanted to come on stage to ask their question so um yeah Mila if I think it's best if you check from the Q&A you did ask a really the one question about the racism in China but did you say you did catch that question or the Chinese virus or the notion of the Chinese virus and this sort of um I would say um this this is tapping into kind of countries pulling down their lights and locking their doors and promoting the national approaches and saying like the enemy's outside or it's not our fault and this is coming from uh outside rather than kind of international cooperation to fight the pandemic to kind of create a functioning international framework to kind of do joined decision making and and kind of construct the decision making or what do you think David um I'm sorry everybody can hear me now I've been I haven't been able to hear anything or say anything for the last five months okay so we were we were talking about the kind of um the naming the pandemic of the virus as a Chinese virus um is is there some some racism there um uh from some countries uh like United States this was one of the kind of um yeah no I think if we put it into your one and two the scientific knowledge on the politics this was the politics obviously of certainly promoting a nationalist agenda that was trying to point the finger and identify others to blame for what was happening in one one's own country so I think that yeah was a mixture of nationalism maybe with some racism thrown in with it the really fascinating thing scientifically is there was no system for naming these virus that was comprehensible to the public there was a complicated coding system that scientists could use but uh you know the introduction of the idea of of delta and beta was trying to quickly come up with something that um that the public would be able to remember uh on that but that was a hasty system to avoid this geographical naming of course the geographical naming is very unfair because countries that have scientific capacity can identify new mutants much quicker so you're always likely to um you have scientific capacity to identify the wrong country that's happened with the Spanish flu that didn't come from Spain exactly exactly um then we have another question from from lauri hey ma would you like to come live to ask your question to click the um if not I'll read it um so one common theme among lauri is here great if you love this and mute yourself can you hear me yes okay so uh you you mentioned uh uk us india and brazil as as examples in and so what I was wondering would uh it would seem that one common theme among among these countries is right wing populism up to a certain extent so do you think that that could be a relevant that could be relevant relevant in interpreting the adoption of scientific advice um certainly yeah right wing populism does seem to make it more likely that scientific advice um may find it's negotiated with and does seem to create a strong potential likelihood of it being rejected um of a populist leader believing that he or she um has a greater understanding usually most of these uh leaders are he because the other example I did that was new zealand where yes I mean that would support your argument because in a way um one hasn't got a populist one's got a popular but not a populist leader there who is prepared to give bad news to um to her population and is not looking to blame somebody else all of the time so the anyway the politics of the last five to ten years in which we've moved to right wing populism certainly mean that there are now probably more countries that um that will find it difficult to actually apply science effectively thank you um I think it's slowly time to wrap up so I think the next what we're going to do is to provide our key takeaways and and what kind of what what do we think is the most important in this discussion um maybe three key takeaways or main messages okay well for me there's I mean there's one big one which is that um I want to encourage as many people as possible to try to analyze this as the pandemic becomes less and less important but to actually look back probably to to the two-year period from just as the as the pandemic was as COVID-19 began to move across China and move into other parts of the world um certainly up until the end of 21 but I think we need to look closely really at um late 2019 to the end of 21 to look at the different ways in which um different countries different parts of the world have handled this to see if we could come up with some in a way evidence-based conclusions about which countries use scientific knowledge effectively and why that was the case politically but also perhaps in technical terms because obviously one of the difficult things with this pandemic has been it's not one thing you keep on getting waves of it as you get mutants and you get variants and those are dealt with differently depending on your access to vaccines and whether you can persuade your population to use those vaccines so I think this is a topic that really needs looking at so that we'll understand future pandemics but also so we will just have a deeper understanding of the way in which science um can and cannot be used effectively and certainly if we could identify what the factors are that have encouraged um some countries to use science effectively and others um have allowed them not to use it effectively I mean a second thing to look at is what that means um in both democratic and autocratic situations but particularly in democracies whether uh leaders who get it wrong get punished at the ballot box or whether the public relations allow them to actually blame other countries or blame the scientists or blame the opposition and whether one can get forms of governance particularly populist forms of governance that actually don't listen to the science take a set of bad decisions and then manage to effectively blame them on other people so they're not held to um to account and that's certainly I think one of the worrying processes that we're here to be seeing in some of the democratic um contexts it'll be very interesting to see in the USA whether the total mishandling um of the pandemic by Trump actually weakens his position and the idea of Trumpism and the republican party or whether they managed to put a spin on it which shows it wasn't their fault when it was their fault. Thank you very very much with you I think really just a very short that it is really a crisis not just not um science progress is through trial and error and so forth so Mila you're very busy again okay well I think we we could perhaps wrap up because we are over time and I would have to refresh in order to start better. Thanks very much then Mila and Lumie for setting the session up and for running it thanks very much for for the this conversation and the earlier conversations we've had Mila. Thank you very much thank you