Broad Medical Uncertainty and the ethical obligation for openness

How denialist amplification spread COVID misinformation and undermined the credibility of public health science

Denialist scientists played an outsized role in shaping public opinion and determining public health policy during the recent COVID pandemic. From early on, amplification of researchers who denied the threat of COVID shaped public opinion and undermined public health policy. The forces that amplify denialists include (1) Motivated amplifiers seeking to protect their own interests by supporting denialist scientists, (2) Conventional media outlets giving disproportionate time to denialist opinions, (3) Promoters of controversy seeking to gain traction in an 'attention economy,' and (4) Social media creating information silos in which denialists can become the dominant voice. Denialist amplification poses an existential threat to science relevant to public policy. It is incumbent on the scientific community to create a forum to accurately capture the collective perspective of the scientific community related to public health policy that is open to dissenting voices but prevents artificial amplification of denialists.

A Taxonomy of Non-honesty in Public Health Communication

This paper discusses the ethics of public health communication. We argue that a number of commonplace tools of public health communication risk qualifying as non-honest and question whether or not using such tools is ethically justified. First, we introduce the concept of honesty and suggest some reasons for thinking it is morally desirable. We then describe a number of common ways in which public health communication presents information about health-promoting interventions. These include the omission of information about the magnitude of benefits people can expect from health-promoting interventions, and failure to report uncertainty associated with the outcomes of interventions. Next we outline some forms of behaviour which are generally recognised by philosophers as being non-honest, including deception, manipulation, and so on. Finally, we suggest that many of the public health communicative practices identified earlier share features with the non-honest behaviours described and suggest this warrants reflection upon whether such non-honesty is justified by the goals of public health communication.