In Asia’s Covid-19 reopening debate, are scientists having too much say?
- Critics say zero-Covid economies have become enthralled to a small subset of experts who are overstepping their areas of expertise, exaggerating risks and dismissing the negative effects of lockdowns
- In the process, politics and ethics are being sidelined. As the disease becomes endemic, fields such as philosophy may offer insights
Throughout the pandemic, public health experts have loomed large in debates and government policymaking about how to manage the once-a-century global crisis.
Yet the dominance of a relatively small group of experts from a limited number of scientific fields – in particular epidemiology and virology – has also raised questions about the kind of expertise informing the pandemic response, including whether more broad-based knowledge is needed to tackle a crisis with implications for practically every aspect of society.
Such questions have been especially pressing in “zero-Covid” economies in the Asia-Pacific, where authorities and prominent experts have adopted a hyper-cautious approach towards any loosening of restrictions, including some of the world’s strictest border controls. Although credited with keeping deaths to a minimum, a zero-tolerance attitude towards Covid-19 cases in places such as Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong has left authorities struggling to map out a path back to normality, even as other parts of the world such as Europe welcome the return of international travel. Australia has placed several major cities including Sydney in lockdown in recent weeks in response to outbreaks, and last week announced plans to keep its borders closed until the country reaches the high bar of 80 per cent vaccine coverage among eligible adults. Hong Kong and New Zealand, which both announced a modest easing of border restrictions in recent days, have yet to indicate when they might broadly reopen to the world.
In an opinion piece in The Sydney Morning Herald last month, Nick Coatsworth, Australia’s former deputy chief medical officer, accused a subset of academics and medical commentators of stepping outside their roles into the realm of political decision-making, exaggerating risks and dismissing the negative impacts of harsh restrictions such as lockdowns.
“In effect, their risk aversion is as extreme as the ‘let-it-rip’, ‘it’s just the flu’ commentariat, simply from the other side of the coin,” Coatsworth said.
Coatsworth, who did not respond to a request for comment from This Week in Asia, argued scientists should present their understanding of the science, but “leave the policy to those who actually have responsibility for the community and for weighing up the consequences of Covid-19, be they physical, mental, social or economic.”