Review of 'Reflections on Trust and Covid 19: Do Politics, Medicine and the Environment need each other?'

Reviewer: Nicholas Ross Smith

Publication date of review: 2020-07-16

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Nicholas Ross Smith5

Reflections on Trust and Covid 19: Do Politics, Medicine and the Environment need each other?Crossref ScienceOpen

Timely and thought provoking

Average rating:	    Rated 5 of 5.
Level of importance:	    Rated 5 of 5.
Level of validity:	    Rated 5 of 5.
Level of completeness:	    Rated 5 of 5.
Level of comprehensibility:	    Rated 5 of 5.
Competing interests:	None

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Reflections on Trust and Covid 19: Do Politics, Medicine and the Environment need each other?

Alistair Cole, Frédéric Dutheil, Julien S Baker (2020)

The short article is centered on how trust can be a valuable resource for developing cognate responses to the Covid 19 pandemic in the medical and social sciences. Politics and Medicine can learn from each other. Governments need to persuade individuals to adapt their behaviors, and such persuasion will be all the more convincing in that it is nested in social networks. Trust in government requires consistent (benevolent, performative and joined-up) explanations. The distinction between hard medical and soft social science blurs when patients/citizens are required to be active participants in combatting a pandemic virus.

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Review information

DOI:: 10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-SOCSCI.AXC88X.v1.RXTBXB

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This work has been published open access under Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Conditions, terms of use and publishing policy can be found at www.scienceopen.com.

Keywords: environment, Covid 19 ,transdisciplinarity,Policy and law,medical and social science,international comparison ,political science,Trust

Review text

It is to state the obvious to say that this piece is extremely timely. The topic of the article is of central importance to trying to think critically about how best to arrange technocratic responses to challenges like COVID19 (and also, future challenges that will emerge out of climate change). To my mind, this is an area which is under-researched and I think the authors here are doing a good job in getting the ball rolling on this - it is also a great strength that this collaboration is interdisciplinary as well.

The trust aspect the authors examine is interesting and the authors do a very good job of bringing in ideas from the extant literature. It is easy to follow and gives much food for thought throughout. Of course, this is not that substantive or rigorous a paper, but for the time, this is an appropriate (and likely will be well-received) piece.