Ball Philip
Freelance, London SE22, UK.
Interface Focus. 2021 Oct 12;11(6):20210022. doi: 10.1098/rsfs.2021.0022. eCollection 2021 Dec 6.
The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021 required politicians to work alongside and depend on scientists more closely than any other event in recent times. It also saw science unfold in real time under intense public scrutiny. As a result, it highlighted as never before the ways in which science interacts with policy-making and with society, showing with sometimes painful clarity that science does not operate in a social or political vacuum. With the advent of vaccines against the coronavirus that has caused the pandemic, science has come to be seen as something of a saviour. But at other times and in other contexts it has also been cast as a villain and an inconvenience, and has run into stark conflict with political leadership. In this article, I consider these issues with particular reference to the situation in the UK-which, as with any nation, illustrated some considerations of more general applicability but also had aspects unique to this country. I argue that there are many lessons to be learnt, and that, as this is surely not the last infectious-disease crisis of such magnitude that the world will face, we must hope they will be heeded.
2020至2021年的全球新冠疫情使政治家们比近代任何其他事件都更需要与科学家密切合作并依赖他们。这一时期，科学也在公众的密切审视下实时展开。结果，它比以往任何时候都更突出地展现了科学与政策制定以及与社会相互作用的方式，有时清晰得令人痛苦地表明科学并非在社会或政治真空中运行。随着针对引发这场疫情的冠状病毒的疫苗问世，科学已被视为某种救世主。但在其他时候和其他背景下，它也被描绘成反派和麻烦制造者，并与政治领导层发生了尖锐冲突。在本文中，我将特别结合英国的情况来探讨这些问题——英国与任何国家一样，既体现了一些具有更广泛适用性的考量因素，也有该国独有的方面。我认为有许多经验教训可供汲取，而且鉴于这肯定不是世界将面临的最后一场如此规模的传染病危机，我们必须希望这些教训能得到重视。
