(HEA2) The COVID-19 Pandemic Response: A Reappraisal

Maslow’s Pyramid was developed in the 1940s by American psychologist Abraham Maslow to supersede the pathologizing of the human condition informing the most popular psychological theories of the time, Freud’s psychoanalysis and Skinner’s behaviourism. Maslow, a humanist, believed that human beings have a universal drive towards self-actualization, meaning the development of their fullest spiritual potential, for which they need the essentials for physical survival, such as food, shelter, and health, among others. While the normative goal of public health policy is precisely to promote, protect, or when possible, restore the health of populations, policies that forget that health is not a goal but rather a means to support meaningful and purposeful lives – which may differ from person to person - do so at their peril. We propose that the past three years have witnessed a plethora of public health policies that, independently from their normative goals, have frequently caused more harm than good, and invite scholars from a variety of perspectives to identify, appraise, and problematize scientific, social, political, and ethical aspects of the public health response to Covid-19. While “getting the science right” is critical to evidence-based public health policy, it is equally important to examine how public policy responses to Covid-19 have contributed or not to promote the values at the top of Maslow’s pyramid. The goal is to learn from mistakes with a view to informing policies that can promote not only better health but also human dignity as well as a more democratic and inclusive social coexistence. Tags: Equality and Inequality, Health and Care, Policy

Organizer: Claudia Chaufan, York University; Chair: Claudia Chaufan, York University

Presentations

Harris Ali, York University

Social Inequality and the Differential Impacts of COVID-19 in the Urban Periphery

Those in the periphery of cities played an important role in pandemic response while bearing the brunt of the impacts. This paper investigates this neglected dimension of the pandemic response and the unfolding impacts by focusing on the “forgotten densities” of those residing and working in the urban periphery. Based on sites peripheral to Toronto – residential suburbs, warehouse districts, airport areas, First Nations reserves and agricultural locales – we discuss how the adoption and implementation of outbreak control measures, were unevenly applied across these sites relative to the city core, thus leading to particular challenges and consequences for the socially marginalized.

Claus Rinner, Toronto Metropolitan University

Challenging hate of "the unvaccinated": An imperative for sustainable post-pandemic recovery

Millions of Canadians who declined the COVID-19 vaccines were exposed to various forms of hate in the last three years. Using the August 26, 2021, Toronto Star front page (“Let them die”) and a January 15, 2024, Winnipeg Free Press op-ed (“The unwelcome unvaxxed”), I illustrate how the news media fueled, and possibly even ignited, this hatred. I argue that socially sustainable post-pandemic recovery requires agreement on three points of evidence and principle: (1) failure of the vaccines to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection and transmission; (2) falsehood of the “pandemic of the unvaccinated”; and (3) the ethical perversion of vaccination mandates.

Claudia Chaufan, York University

"Trust us. We are the experts": A critical policy perspective on expert meanings of health "misinformation" in the COVID-19 era

In April of 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) released the report Managing the COVID-19 infodemic: A call to action, declaring that “the 2020 pandemic of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) [had] been accompanied by a massive ‘infodemic.’” Soon afterwards UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres tweeted, also alluding to COVID-19, that “a tsunami of misinformation, scapegoating and scaremongering [had] been unleashed.” The tweet was followed by a March 2021 report from the Centre for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, warning that “health-related misinformation and disinformation” were undermining the public response to COVID-19, and, about a year later, by a Department of Homeland Security infographic, Disinformation Stops With You , alerting about the “risks to democratic institutions” of “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and “malinformation” – dubbed MDM and conceptually including “infodemic” - distinguishing these terms based on the presumed intentionality of the agents producing or spreading them. These and similar calls to “manage” any form of discourse produced by individuals or groups skeptical of the “scientific consensus” are emerging from dominant social institutions, and have been paradigmatically captured in a recent report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), dubbed Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms , whose goal is to protect “free, high-quality, and independent media and information tools” to both safeguard “freedom of expression and the right to information” and control the “threat” of “dis- and misinformation, hate speech, and conspiracy theories.” As per UNESCO, this goal requires “a multistakeholder approach” including partnerships among governments, regulatory agencies, civil society, and digital media platforms. The ambitious nature of this goal notwithstanding, there has been scant critical examination within academia of what social and political institutions and actors spearheading these calls mean by MDM in the COVID-19 context, of the standards against which truth and falsehood of claims should be assessed, and of the implications of the premises underlying these meanings for public policy, equity, and civil, social, and political rights. Drawing from the traditions of critical policy, discourse, and document analysis, we critically review the literature produced by selected dominant social institutions – academic medicine, academic social sciences, and NGOs – by applying Arksey O’Malley’s scoping review framework, enhanced by Levac et al.’s team-based approach. We summarize, and appraise this literature systematically while assessing its implications for the health and well-being of populations affected by policies informed by dominant concepts of MDM. This presentation reports preliminary findings of our investigation.

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Non-presenting authors: Camila Heredia, York University; Natalie Hemsing, York University; Jennifer McDonald, York University