September 10, 2024
COVID
York University (Canada)
"Abstract: Since the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, prominent social actors and institutions have warned about the threat of misinformation, calling for policy action to address it. However, neither the premises underlying expert claims nor the standards to separate truth from falsehood have been appraised. We conducted a scoping review of the medical and social scientific literature, informed by a critical policy analysis approach, examining what this literature means by misinformation. We searched academic databases and refereed publications, selecting a total of 68 articles for review. Two researchers independently charted the data. Our most salient finding was that verifiability relied largely on the claims of epistemic authorities, albeit only those vetted by the establishment, to the exclusion of independent evidentiary standards or heterodox perspectives. Further, 'epistemic authority' did not depend necessarily on subject matter expertise, but largely on a new type of “expertise”: in misinformation itself...
Conclusions: ... [I]t is well documented that historically, 'othering' has resulted in the stigmatisation of dissenters and, in the case of Covid policy, in the suppression of 'inconvenient' data (epidemiological, clinical, and immunological) and of moral debate in support of a 'state of exception', in which the suspension of individual rights and freedoms is presented as the only (always temporary) road to collective salvation.
We conclude that, at a minimum, continuing efforts to identify, manage, or suppress MDM [Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation] blunt much-needed democratic and open debate about matters of major social relevance in public health matters and beyond. They also impair open and socially useful scientific inquiry, and have chilling effects on normative academic principles, such as the pursuit of knowledge, the protection of freedom of expression, and the promotion of critical thinking among younger generations. No less importantly, these efforts represent a grave threat to fundamental bioethical principles such as informed consent, violate the dignity of human beings by treating them as a contingent means towards ostensibly higher societal goals, and neglect the long history of policy interventions implemented 'for our own good' that, all too often, turned out to be morally repugnant. As long as the establishment vetted experts—or, rather, a cult of expertise—dominate public discourse and policy practice, the loss of public trust that appears to preoccupy authorities as they attempt to regain this trust will be inevitable."
Submission received: 18 June 2024 / Revised: 19 August 2024 / Accepted: 28 August 2024 / Published: 10 September 2024
© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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censorship,COVID-19,fact checking,vaccines