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

Abstract

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.

Journal

Title: UCL Open: Environment Preprint

Publisher: UCL Press

Publication date (Electronic preprint): 18 July 2020

Affiliations

[1 ] Professor of Political Science and Head of the Department of Government and International Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong

[2 ] Professor in Medicine and Head of “Preventive and Occupational Medicine” at the University Hospital of Clermont-Ferrand (CHU), France

[3 ] Professor and Head of the Department of Sport, Physical Education and Health, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong.

Article

DOI: 10.14324/111.444/000046.v2

License:

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding

This article acknowledges the financial and logistical support of Hong Kong Baptist University. The corresponding author acknowledges, and is grateful for the financial support of Hong Kong Baptist University, Research Committee, Initiation Grant - Faculty Niche Research Areas (IG-FNRA) 2019/20.