Wilmot James: To Get Pandemic Response Right We Must Get our Politics Right
Wilmot James, Senior Research Scholar at ISERP, and Charles Hamilton, W. S. Sayre Professor Emeritus of Government and Political Science, published in Columbia News.
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how some strong, wealthy democracies, like the United States, struggled to manage the public health crisis.
Pandemic response tends to be a top-down technocratic affair. Responsible decision-makers mobilize the best available science and engineering knowledge to implement social, public health, and clinical interventions on a scale that is commensurate with what it takes to manage, control, and possibly eliminate the circulation of infectious agents. But there is, as we have learned, a caveat: for this approach to work, consent and active cooperation of the people is required.