KQED Forum's Alexis Madrigal moderates a conversation with Peter Loewen, Adrian Raftery, Prerna Singh, and Rob Willer on the intersections among public health, social and cultural influences, and social and behavioral sciences insights.
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Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. The COVID pandemic produced a vast array of responses. Which social and behavioral scientists will likely be studying for years. But it's not as though we came into this pandemic with a clean slate. Decades of advanced study have helped us be better informed and prepared for events such as this. So to what extent have our understandings aligned with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts? What do we know? Has anything changed? And what remains unsettled? Today on Human Centered, another episode in our Social Science for a World in Crisis series. This episode of the series, which broadcast on June 23rd, 2021, is titled "How Social Science Advances Our Understanding of Pandemics," and it features panelists Peter Loewen, Professor of Political Science, Global Affairs, and Public Policy at the University of Toronto and a 2018-19 CASBS Fellow; Adrian Raftery, the Boeing International Professor of Statistics and Sociology at the University of Washington and a 2017-18 CASBS Fellow. Purna Singh, the Mahatma Gandhi Associate Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Brown University and a 2020-2021 CASBS Fellow. Rob Willer, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University and a CASBS Fellow in 2012-2013 and again in 2020-2021. Moderating the conversation is Alexis Madrigal, staff writer for The Atlantic, co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic, and the co-host of KQED Forum in San Francisco. The panel explores the role that borders, both at national and subnational levels, play in determining vulnerability and resilience in the face of infectious disease. Why are some countries or regions within countries polarized while others are not? How can cross-national and historical analyses inform our perspective of how citizens learn from and engage with scientists, experts, and each other? And what are the roles of social and cultural influences on the frictions between individual and collective behavior? Now, join Human Centered as we listen in on the CASBS event, How Social Science Advances Our Understanding of Pandemics.
Alexis Madrigal: Hello everyone, I'm Alexis Madrigal. I'll be your moderator today. I'm the co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and now my main gig is that I've taken over for Michael Krasny, for those of you who know the Bay Area, here on KQED's show Forum. I'm actually in the station, which is under construction, so if you hear any weird noises, It's not me, it's those guys doing all the construction down the hall. Thank you for joining us. This is the 16th episode of CASBS's webcast series, Social Science for a World in Crisis. And I wanna acknowledge on behalf of the center, the partners for this episode, CIFAR, the Pandemic Action Network, the Public Policy Forum, Sage Publishing, and the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. You've got the panelists' bios and you've got links to their bios, so I'm not gonna do the extended biographies with all their awards and appointments and other things. Instead, I'll just give you a short, the short version. Peter Loewen is a professor of political science, global affairs at the University of Toronto, and he was a fellow at Center in 2018, 2019. Adrian Raftery is the Boeing International Professor of Statistics and Sociology at the University of Washington and was a fellow in 2017-2018. Purna Singh is the Mahatma Gandhi Associate Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Brown and, uh, got the cursed year fellowship assignment of 2021. And Rob Willer is professor of sociology and director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford and a fellow, a two-time fellow, once in 2012-2013 and also in 2021. So, as you know, today conversation is how social science advances our understanding of pandemics, and this panel has been selected to bring together a variety of different perspectives. The way that this will go down is that they'll each give sort of a thumbnail sketch— don't, don't think of it as full introductory remarks, but a thumbnail sketch of their research. And then we'll have some interactive discussion. The idea is that people will talk to each other as much as I ask them questions. The order will kind of go like this. First, Adrian will talk about the work that he's done with the National Academies, which sprung into action with surprising speed. Prerna is going to provide us some historical perspective on at least one really great analog to the current vaccination campaign. Rob's going to talk about polarization and the pandemic, and Peter's going to bring in a comparative view with Canada and the US. Last note to attendees, you can submit questions using Zoom's Q&A feature. Try and, you know, try and keep your questions concise and on point. And given the expected volume of questions— there's 71 of you now in the room— we probably won't be able to address them all, but the panelists will, I'm sure, get in touch if you ask them an interesting enough question. Let's start out with Adrian. You're up first.
Adrian Raftery: Okay, well, thanks very much, Alexis. It's great to be here for this conversation about what I think is a really important topic of what social science can contribute to the national response to the pandemic. And I think I may be speaking first because I'm a statistician and really, you know, data is my thing. And I think that was really the first issue that we had to confront Data is fundamental to, I think, everything in terms of making decisions, formulating the response to the pandemic. And, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, things frankly were quite chaotic nationally in terms of, you know, there was a lot of data around, but coordinating it, making sense of it, that was something that was proving very difficult for people and for decision makers. So where I came in was the National Academy of Sciences, as Alexis, I think, said, almost immediately formed this group called Society The Little Experts Action Network, or Sean, which was a group of social scientists, members of the National Academy of Sciences, to basically provide advice for the nation. And particularly actually with a focus for local and state-level decision makers. And the first thing we looked at was data. And it's something— data is something that social scientists, I think, we really know about. It's, you know, we know how to collect it, we know how to analyze it, we know about all the problems with data, the biases, representativeness issues, and all of these which can make, you know, the best intentions not turn out as well as was intended. So basically what we did is we looked at the various data sources, and there were a lot of different data sources, whether it was a number of cases every day in different states, number of deaths, number of hospitalizations, and/or test positivity rates. And we— one of the things I think became apparent to us pretty quickly was that pretty much every data source was deeply flawed, either because it was very biased or because it wasn't really available when it was needed or whatever. So, and just as an example was the test positivity rate, which was used a lot, particularly early on. And that's, that's a real, you know, that's what proportion of the tests came back positive. And that sounds like a really straightforward thing, but it turned out actually it's not. For example, a high high test positivity rate can mean there's a lot of COVID around, or it can mean we're not doing many tests because basically there's very strong selection bias. The people who go to be tested first are the people whose doctors refer them or who think they might have symptoms, and they tend to be the people who have the highest rates. So, you know, this was really a bad idea to use that, but yet it was used for a lot of decisions. So we issued this report which basically looked at, you know, what's good and what's bad about these data sources. It was very widely read by decision makers, again, as I say, particularly at the state and local levels. And I think it was helpful, although we had no magic bullet, but there are various implications like, you know, what are the data needs for this pandemic and for the next one, which may not be too far in the future? What are the implications for decision making? How can data be used? What do we need in the future? A big issue is the federal response, which I think was lacking. And, you know, that's something I think we can talk about a lot. The other— the most optimistic thing, I think, was the response of the society as a whole, where there were a lot of people who were, you know, stepped forward, including Alexis with the COVID tracking project. And although that was not a very coordinated effort, I think it was a very dynamic and generous effort, which, you know, spoke well for American societies as a whole. And in a sense, society responded better to the data needs than the federal government. But so these are some of the issues that I hope we'll touch on during, during this conversation.
Alexis Madrigal: I'll just second all the data problems. And I think the way we ended up thinking about it at COVID Tracking Project was there are basically 56 datasets that both places like COVID Tracking Project or, you know, the federal government itself were trying to stitch together into a national dataset. And one reason test positivity didn't work in a lot of cases was the tests and the positive tests, as I say, cases, were actually traveling at different speeds through the data pipelines. But we'll get more into all those things. It was really a mess. Purna, you're up.
Prerna Singh: Thank you so much for having me, Alexis. And I want to kind of begin where Adrian ended by saying that COVID-19 is only the latest of many pandemics that we have grappled with through history. And my research really looks at what I think of as the last closest, most analogous information campaign for vaccination. So on the one hand, we're living in two worlds really today. On the one hand, we have the US where I live and work, which has an abundance of vaccine supplies. And I'm sure as Rob will speak about a huge amount of vaccine hesitancy that we are trying creatively to counter. On the other hand, in the global south, in India, where I'm from and where I grew up, the pandemic continues to rage and yet we can begin to see signs of vaccine hesitancy. So on the one hand, vaccine hesitancy is not new or specific to COVID in 2019, the WHO put vaccine hesitancy as one of the top 10 global— one of the top 10 threats to global health. Measles had already begun to raise its head because of hesitancy to the MMR vaccine. But on the other hand, and in as much as this is part of this rising threat of vaccine hesitancy in the last decade or so, hesitancy to vaccines is as old as vaccines themselves. And so I studied the world's first ever vaccine, which was against the oldest and deadliest disease to afflict mankind, which was smallpox. And variola vaccinae, the world's first vaccine, which coined the term itself, met with a huge degree of hesitancy, including in England where Jenner lived, who is usually attributed with the invention of the vaccine. And yet hesitancy to this vaccine was overcome because the global dissemination of this vaccine is what led to the eradication of smallpox, which is to date the only human disease that we've been able to eradicate. So my study of the smallpox eradication Global Campaign is, as I said, the closest analogue that we have to the present environment insofar as it is the global spread of the COVID vaccine that is our bridge to being beyond this pandemic. And so if I had to kind of really distill the lessons that I have learned in the course of my tracking of this historical trajectory of the vaccine against smallpox, I think it's really important how the vaccine is communicated. So who communicates the vaccine and why it is you're being asked to take the vaccine, so the framing of it. And so in my research, I found that the trustworthiness of the actors who endorse the vaccine, who provide the vaccines, is a critical factor. And another one is how is the vaccine presented. So drawing on the research of Nobel Prize-winning social psychologist who was also a CASBS fellow many years ago, Daniel Kahneman, I find that if the vaccine is embedded in existing understandings of the world and norms and values, that greatly increases compliance. And so just to give you a concrete example, the vaccine arrives on the shores of Canton and Calcutta, which are very similar cities, at the beginning of the 19th century, shortly after its invention by the same actor, the East India Company. And yet the critical difference in Canton, which saw a much more rapid, enthusiastic spread of the vaccine, was that it was endorsed by the local gentry who were extremely trustworthy, and it was actively and creatively embedded by them as being analogous is to acupuncture, which was a very familiar needling technique to the local population. So this very new invention— so going back to Kahneman's work, the link is that we know that we are motivated reasoners. We are more likely to take on information when it aligns with our existing ways of knowing. So the power of the familiar. So in some senses, it is really an argument for paying close attention to cultural norms, values, understandings of health and healing. So during the smallpox eradication campaign in India in the 19th century, '70s. And this is another point I want to emphasize is that eventually the control of COVID is going to rest on the uptake of the vaccine. First, of course, the provision, because we are still very much in a context of vaccine scarcity, but eventually the uptake of the vaccine in the Global South. And the smallpox eradication campaign was a multilateral coordinated effort by the WHO. And so CDC epidemiologists were in India in the countryside in the 1970s And critical to how they made the vaccine acceptable was by linking it to the worship of the smallpox goddess Sitala. So disease deities have been around with us for a long, long time. And so the smallpox eradication camps of the WHO were organized at Sitala temples because they said, you know, they'll hide from the vaccinators, but they will not hide from the goddess. And so presenting themselves almost as devotees of the goddess rather than acting against her And so, you know, just to kind of, you know, wrap it up in some ways, to me, it really means that if we want for this COVID vaccine to spread, we have to change the way that we approach or think about how humans act and behave. So we are not just rational interest maximizers, because information doesn't change our mind. We know from plenty of interventions that giving people more information about risks and benefits of the vaccine doesn't actually necessarily encourage compliance. It can even backfire. We have to begin by treating humans as moral actors and realizing that questions of trustworthiness, legitimacy of who communicates, and moral norms, values, and worldviews are what's important. So really, treating humans as moral actors is critical in ensuring compliance with the COVID vaccine.
Alexis Madrigal: Thank you so much, Purna. Let's move along to Rob to talk about actually a quite related field of study. Go ahead, Rob.
Rob Willer: Thanks, Alexis. Yeah, my own initial thoughts here are going to very much build off of Prerna's observations about the key role of trusted sources in promoting vaccination in the general public, which is a similar dynamic that we see in the contemporary US with the COVID-19 pandemic. And, you know, in my lab, in our various research on the pandemic and the general public's reaction to it, it's just been so striking how polarized all aspects of the pandemic have been in the general public. All recommended public health behaviors— mask wearing, social distancing, compliance with lockdowns, now vaccination— all of these from the earliest days have shown marked gaps between Democrats' and Republicans' views and behaviors. And the thing that's really striking about this is it's not inevitable. There's no inevitable reason why Republicans in the general public would view the pandemic with less alarm than Democrats would. And in fact, with Ebola, we saw the opposite pattern in the general public. And so when we If you try to figure out just an explanation of this most basic fact of the pandemic as it's obtained in the US and many other countries, the most obvious explanation for why it went down the way it did is the positioning of elite Republicans, and especially Donald Trump, on the severity of the pandemic and on recommended actions from public health officials. And from nearly the very beginning, elite Republicans sought to play down the threat and dismiss recommendations from public health officials. And I think there's a number of reasons why we saw the polarization we did in the mass public in the US, but I think this is the biggest one. But what's really curious about this is that we've seen that same pattern of polarization around vaccination. Why is that curious? Just another recommended behavior that we're seeing big polarization on. Well, what's curious about it is that Republicans were very supportive— like, elite Republican politicians were very supportive of vaccination, played a role in vaccine development, and sort of heralded vaccination as the thing that would take care of this in the end. And in fact, most elite Republicans have gotten vaccinated. And most of the House Republicans accepted, where about half seemed to not be particularly supportive of vaccination. But most really influential American Republicans have publicly supported vaccination. And so why would we see the same polarization on this issue? It seems to me that by the time we got around to vaccines, Republicans in the general public had figured out what the consistent position would be on vaccines following positions on mask wearing in the very beginning of the pandemic and so on. And so they just sort of figured it out, and they didn't need elite cues from respected sources to take that position. But so one implication of this reasoning is that if Republicans did intercede at this point and endorse vaccination more enthusiastically than they have— because I don't think people fully realize that most elite Republicans have supported vaccination— but if they did it, if they did embrace that role more enthusiastically, I think it could make a real difference. And we studied this idea in an experiment that's now forthcoming in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where we took a sample of 1,000 unvaccinated Republican Americans who we recruited online and presented them with one of 3 videos and essays. So in one, they saw a video of Donald Trump promoting vaccination that was paired with an essay with other Republican vaccine endorsements. Another essay and video was a Democrat equivalent with Joe Biden promoting vaccination and other Democrats. And then a third condition just had a neutral video and essay, just sort of a placebo control. And what we found was that when unvaccinated Republicans were presented with these elite Republican endorsements, it increased their intentions to vaccinate 7% or 6 to 7%, depending on how you analyzed it. And I think the takeaway here is that Republican elites hold a great deal of sway with their supporters. Their failure to step up and enthusiastically promote vaccination has likely played a big role in polarization around vaccination and, you know, played a role in the current situation where we see the majority of vaccine-hesitant Americans are Republicans. But inversely, if they were to start to embrace that role, I think they could make a really big difference, and public health officials should support that.
Alexis Madrigal: Great, thank you, Rob. And now we can see how not inevitable this polarization might have been when we hear from Peter.
Peter Loewen: Well, thank you very much for the opportunity to be here and to be virtually back at CASBS, in a sense, which is a place that all of us love to be at. I'll just say a couple of things off the top and then just talk about a couple of— just a couple of observations about this. The first is that it is a really remarkable time to be a social scientist, and it's a remarkable time to see the usefulness of the tools of social science. If you think about what's going on with COVID there's lots of different ways to characterize it. But here are a couple, and these are a couple for which social science has a lot to say. One is that this is really a test of democratic societies, of the capacity— and this touches on what Rob has said— of the capacity for leaders to marshal support, to take on an issue that people are seized by, and to proactively provide solutions to the public. And the capacity of countries to do that, and why some countries have had less capacity than others, is really well worth our study. Because if you think about the problems coming down the pipeline, —things like the problems of severe weather, other pandemics, even aging societies—these are problems that are going to require the marshaling of collective effort and really political leadership more than, than some of the problems we've dealt with in more recent years. At the level of citizens, it represents a massive test of collective action and coordination problems. Asking millions—in my own country, millions of people—to stay home and put their lives on hold to protect themselves, yes, but principally to protect other people who are vulnerable and are more susceptible to this virus. That's a remarkable act of self-sacrifice by a very large number of people, and it's really something that we've been able to do it. And it's been done because of government action, but also because of just the everyday actions of everyday people. So I think that those things are really the domain of social science and understanding why this has gone well in some places and less well than others, I think, is something that social scientists have a lot to say about. And look, all of this is happening in the context of information ecosystems, which we really don't fully understand. We really don't understand how people are learning about things in our society right now, given the breathtaking clip at which effectively platforms are changing. So I think that all these things together really make it an interesting time to be to be a social scientist. Let me just say two quick things about what my colleagues and I have been doing on this. We've been, in my lab, have been engaging in a very large-scale study of Canadians since— I'm in Toronto— since March of 2020. We've interviewed now 100,000 people over the course of the pandemic, and it's given us some, I think, some really interesting lines of sight into how everyday citizens have decided to address this pandemic. We've kept very close track of what politicians have said, what journalists and experts have said, what exists on social media, but understanding the behavior of individuals in the context of this, understanding why some comply and others don't, understanding the sources of vaccine hesitancy for some and not for others, understanding how citizens have worked their way through this large-scale problem, which we're all in together and experiencing collectively, is a remarkably interesting thing. What I might say right now is just the following, that I think there's a remarkable natural experiment going on, and we can draw a really interesting contrast between Canada and the United States. But if you even broaden the lens out just a little bit more to kind of think about the Anglo-American countries, the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, 5 different countries, different strategies to deal with COVID different vaccine production capacities, different healthcare systems, different vaccine procurement strategies, different rollouts. They've all taken to some degree or another different paths than one another. Different degrees of compliance with government, different degrees of trust in experts, different degree of compliance with lockdowns, even demand for lockdowns. So looking from that perspective and understanding the variety of outcomes that we could have is both interesting, but it also, I think, only raises the question more acutely why the American response has been so different than the response in other places. Now, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the UK look, look different in important ways, but they look similar in the degree to which they've been able to rely on citizen compliance and some basic level of trust in government. And an elite consensus across the top to address COVID. The US really stands out in this case, and understanding why I think is interesting. And let me just say one more thing, which is that to go even— zoom out even a bit farther, at least geographically, if not temporally, I've been working with great colleagues at Oxford and other places to measure global preferences on vaccines. And I'll just note two things from forthcoming papers. We have a paper in Nature Medicine and a paper forthcoming soon in another journal. On global vaccination preferences. And the state of the world in January was that in high-income countries, the majority of citizens were willing to share a substantial supply of national vaccines into COVAX to share globally. I don't think it's the case now. We'll know in a couple of weeks, but I think it's less the case now. And domestically, citizens were willing to prioritize for vaccines not only the elderly and not only the immunocompromised, but those people who make everyday life work, Amazon delivery drivers, people working in factories, on warehouse floors, taxi drivers, teachers. And very few countries, even my own, took seriously the idea that we could reimagine who was really in need from COVID that we could do something beyond pedantic egalitarianism and really target people who were genuinely in need. So what I see there is that there was a potential— to go back to Rob's point about political leadership— there really was a global moment moment before vaccines really started to roll out to reimagine the kind of moral commitments we had to people and how we were going to share vaccines. And we haven't realized those. I don't know that that window is completely shut. But that itself is, I think, an interesting foray into— or an interesting window into understanding the degree to which our solution for this could be really global as opposed to national, however successful some national solutions may have Good.
Alexis Madrigal: So something before we get to some of the audience questions, I'm going to mix in pretty much right away. I do have one question that in different ways each of you sort of addressing, which is this capacity of states to get their citizens to believe certain things or to have certain attitudes, adopt certain behaviors. And I'm wondering how we should go about trying to study in some kind live-fire way, what capacity different states do have, or different national governments do have, in order to influence people, particularly given that the traditional— as we've sort of been saying, you know, we used to sort of minimize it by saying, oh, well, you know, social media has done X or Y. But it's really the full-scale sort of rewiring, and I think COVID really showed this, full-scale rewiring of the information flows to ordinary citizens, short-circuiting, and oftentimes, you know, Centers for Disease Control. Most people, I would venture to say, got their information from a non-governmental body on COVID data, whether it was a digital site of a newspaper, COVID Tracking Project, 3.5 Acres, or a whole bunch of different places. And the more I thought about that, the more it actually became to bother me, because this is actually an erosion of state capacity in a way that is quite terrifying. So I'm not sure who wants to take that one first. We could go around the horn, or Rob looks like he's unmuted, so he gets to go first.
Rob Willer: OK, thanks, Alexis. Yeah, I had a couple of thoughts on this. I mean, I've very much appreciated the work by Michelle Gelfand and colleagues on national-level predictors of COVID rates, rates of COVID in the general population, especially in the early stages of the pandemic. And a couple of the biggest predictors that that research showed were how individualist versus collectivist a culture was, and then how big or small their government was. And so you see more collectivist cultures with big governments are able to take stronger action early on in the pandemic and are able to do lockdowns and get everybody on board with lockdowns or have contact tracing policies and people participate in them. In other places, where you have individualist cultures, smaller governments like the United States, you have a lot of trouble. Government doesn't mobilize to take strong action. And even if they did, or what they do do, they struggle to get the general population to fall in line. So I just think about where I grew up in South Carolina. If you sent drones up and down the streets to enforce a lockdown, people would shoot the drones. It would not be endorsed. It's not just a failure of political leadership. There's also a culture and a history within which you can't take the actions that you maybe would like to take to address a pandemic. And it's interesting to think about the pandemic having characteristics that make it feasting on individual-level characteristics, but then also collective-level characteristics and taking off in societies that are less able to fight it.
Peter Loewen: I might just add that I just think that the challenge for governments, even a country like mine where there's been lots of compliance with government, is to figure out and to be really clear-eyed about how much of this response has been people figuring it out on their own. And how much of it has been because of expert advice or government counsel. And I think that it's a mistake to overestimate how much of it is because of expertise for a couple of reasons, right? One is that you're going to overstate the degree to which— you're going to overestimate the degree to which you can deal with problems in the future. But the second is that it just kind of misses the mystery and kind of the beauty of the fact that citizens kind of figured this out. They figured out what they owe their fellow citizens, and they've taken behaviors that have been in response to that, sometimes at great cost. So I think that it's really important that we do calibrate that right. I think Rob's intuitions are right about what the big forces are that make it more possible in some states than in others. But really figuring out why citizens have been willing to make these sacrifices for as long as they have has to do much more than with political leadership.
Alexis Madrigal: Purna, I was about to say, I feel like this is where we've tread in your territory now.
Prerna Singh: No, I was just going to say, you know, just to build on what Peter and Rob have said is that, you know, like to me, you can't snap your fingers and the genie of trustworthiness is going to emerge for a state. And, you know, suddenly, because you kind of reap the consequences of state society histories at these critical junctures. And so to me, I think what's, you know, absolutely, you know, individual versus collectivist cultures, but also what's what has been the relationship and place of the state as regards society. I think that those are really important factors to take into account. So, for instance, you know, how much of a role did the state play in the provision of health? Or, you know, as Peter alluded to, to get yourself vaccinated is a big ask, actually, in some ways. One, it's the classic collective action problem, like taxation or joining the army. You're actually best off if everybody else does it and you free ride on the benefit of it, because like everything else, vaccines have a risk. And so, you know, it's a poke in the arm and possibly something else. And so if you are actually rational interest maximizing, you won't do it. So in a way, I think it begins by saying, look, this is hard. This is a hard thing to ask. It's kind of classic Foucauldian biopower. It's an intervention into our body. I think the one interesting and perhaps helpful thing about COVID is that we are vaccinating ourselves because For almost all diseases, it's childhood vaccination. And I think this is going to be the next threshold for COVID, as we are already seeing that people who were not at all hesitant about taking the vaccine themselves are far more hesitant for their children. And so, you know, I think that that's going to be another step. But in order to be able to make this, you know, very intimate intervention into my body or that of my child, I think there needs to be attention to historically what has been the relationship of the state to society. And I think here is an opportunity for the state to link to society, for instance, through reaching out to religious leaders, other forms of civil society leaders. We saw this for Ebola. We knew that, you know, something that was really impeding the control of Ebola were funeral practices in East Africa, the laying of the hands in order to kind of send the spirit onwards. And all WHO messaging was unsuccessful until they could get the buy-in of the local clergy who suggested a very creative modification to this very essential funeral ritual. And so COVID has upended how we live, how we die. So I think, you know, realizing that this is a hard ask of people, that state histories matter, and that states need to reach out to understand what is the milieu in which they're asking people to make such an intervention is important. And finally, I just want to say, you know, ideas of nationalism, of patriotism have been so important in eliciting this kind of, you know, in a way, root out of the collective action problem. So you're doing it for yourself, you're also doing it for the state, and this is why the rise of this kind of exclusionary white nationalism, Hindu nationalism, kind of presents a real problem, because it's almost as if we have lost a recourse to what was a very powerful collective identity that could have led to this kind of societal onboarding with a hard state ask.
Adrian Raftery: Yeah, I think, Alexis, yeah, to follow on, I think this, the role of the state is very, it's a very important aspect, and I think Pernaz has very nicely kind of discussed that, and I think possibly in the United States there's more skepticism about the role of the central government than in some of the other countries that have been discussed, but this is definitely in terms of data, this was something that was apparent almost immediately in our committee, you know, when we were National Academy of Sciences committee when we were talking about data, you know, one of the first things that was said is, well, you know, this is really the CDC's job and, you know, we shouldn't be doing it, they should be doing it. And of course, actually they weren't. And there was this at the very beginning, there was this absolutely extraordinary situation that I think illustrates, you know, maybe strengths and weaknesses of the United States, which is the data in the early days of January 2020, the very before it was really, you know, taken off in the US at all. Data on the pandemic was being— in the United States, it was mainly being maintained by a guy called Avi Schiffman, who was a 17-year-old high school student in Mercer Island, just beside ourselves here in Seattle. And he did an extraordinary job of coordinating the world's, you know, the world information on the pandemic. And, you know, this was something— the CDC has 10,000 full-time employees, professional employees, you know, PhDs, epidemiologists, statisticians, all sorts of things. They were not able to do what this 17-year-old kid was doing. And, you know, everybody was going to his site, including people from the CDC, apparently. And, you know, that was— then there was a very small group of academics at Johns Hopkins University in computer science that kind of took that over and coordinated things. And then the COVID tracking project. So I think there's a big need. Really, it is the job— that is the kind of thing— it is the job of the central government. Part of the strength of the United States is that civil society, you know, in a sense stepped forward in unexpected ways. But I think that going forward, there's a need for the federal government to learn from that. And, you know, we know how to do it because people have done it, how to coordinate the information. So I think that's really a central thing. I think another thing is the different data sources, as I've said, are very flawed, right? So they all— if you rely on any one of them, it's a bad idea. So for example, number of cases or test positivity rates are quite flawed individually. But now we have enough information to essentially correct these flaws and put them together. And that is something with a student we've been doing that, and we have a paper I think is going to come out in PNAS that, you know, how can you bring together all these data sources, coordinate them, and you know, bias correct them, take account of their uncertainties, all these, all these kind of things. And other people have been working on this as well. And this really is something which I think should be institutionalized. I think, you know, the COVID tracking project, which was extraordinary, and actually we used it for our work. So we were kind of downloading and drawing on Alexis's website, which is, which is incredible. But of course Alexis has moved on, and that's— it's not sustainable in, in the, in the long term. So, so that is And that's the kind of thing that I think ultimately should be institutionalized, or not ultimately, but in short order institutionalized as a regular thing.
Alexis Madrigal: What is the chance of getting better timely national data on health after all this is over? Question from Mark Kurczak. Thanks, Mark.
Adrian Raftery: Well, yeah, thanks very much. I think that's a really great question. And I really hope that the chance is good. I think that this— I think Purna was making this point that a crisis like this illustrates where we are and illustrates some of the needs and the lacks. And I think that, you know, throughout the society, and particularly at the level of decision makers, whether they're, you know, county health officials, state governors, other school board people, the needs— the need and the demand for good quality data that avoids the kinds of problems that there are with all the data sources, even now, actually, that's a really big need. And I think there's a demand there there are, you know, there is a federal agency whose job is to provide it, and the work of other people has shown how to do it. So I really am, you know, optimistic that that'll be one of the things that will come out of the— will come out in the future. And I think it's got to be a focus because, you know, when the pandemic starts, the next pandemic starts, let's put it that way, it's not the right time to be trying to build that. And that is something we can do it now. There's, you know, hopefully we've got a bit of a lead time and we've learned a lot from this pandemic. So I'm, you know, optimistic within reason about that, but I think it's something we need to not take our eye off the ball on that. We need to actually do it and make it a focus. And it doesn't take that many resources to do it. As you know, if a 17-year-old kid can do it in his bedroom in Mercer Island, then, you the might of the most powerful government on the earth should be able to do it. And especially, you know, they just get this— they fly this kid up to Washington, D.C. and say, "How did you do it?" You know, then problem solved.
Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, and Rob, I'm going to go to you in just one second. I just wanted to tack on one little bit to the end of Adrian's answer, which is I think one crucially difficult thing about getting better national data is the governance issues between the states and the Fed. So, you know, it's not like the government capacity is necessarily additive there. In fact, it's kind of the opposite, that in fact, like, a lot of the way that the states interpreted their sort of their mandate to their citizens was in fact to protect the data from the federal government, you know, and that generated a lot of problems, and it meant that the standards that played out across the country were interpreted differently in different places. And in fact, the legal right to the data in most cases rests with the state government. So that's why when I said 56 datasets, I actually really mean it quite literally, that the feds themselves are at the mercy of state governments. And it was one of those things where you realize that our national government, what is it? And seeing a state sense, they really— the national government they couldn't really see what was happening out in the world because the states weren't necessarily willing to show them that. Robert, I want to come to you on a slightly different topic, which is something that you and Purna and Peter have all touched on, which is about the trusted people, you know, that the messenger matters as much as the message. Seems like one of the key problems, though, is how do you find the trusted people? I mean, this seems like it just kind of kicks the can down the road in some sense, How do you— what's the methodology for finding trusted messengers?
Rob Willer: Yeah, well, I mean, this has been kind of a truism in public health research since, you know, for all time, perhaps. But it was demonstrated quite vividly in responses to the Ebola crisis in West Africa, where World Health Organization, Obama administration, you know, reaching out, realized right away that it's really hard to come in and offer these really counterintuitive recommendations, like wash your hands a dozen times a day, don't go to a parent's funeral, as an outsider, it's just not legitimate. And so they realized working with local faith leaders, village elders, identifying who are the trusted sources in these communities was absolutely critical to drive uptake. And we've, in our lab, taken a similar approach trying to say, okay, well, what are the vaccine-hesitant subpopulations in the US? And then who are the people that they respect the most? And so if you see Republicans stick out as, depending on how you want to measure it, somewhere between 55% and 2/3 of the vaccine-hesitant population in the US. OK, who do they uniquely respect? Republican leaders and politicians. That's why I went to go study that. But also, you can go to sports figures, regional figures that have cachet, faith leaders in the US as well. And we've also tried to study that, because one of the bigger predictors is religiosity of vaccine hesitancy. And we have some some new research suggesting that Francis Collins, CDC director, when he identifies as a religious person, the exact same recommendations or analyses from him of the vaccine and its effectiveness are seen as having more credibility with American Christians than if they don't know that he's Christian. And so this is another way to get at it. You can kind of go at it directly by invoking an identity that's associated with the vaccine hesitancy, like a political identity, or kind of indirectly by sort of saying, OK, Republicans in America are vaccine hesitant because their leaders didn't step up, or maybe some other factors. But what are other identities they hold that you could connect to, like their religiosity, like their region, or something like that? These are the strategies that we've looked at.
Prerna Singh: Yeah, just can I just quickly tag on to Rob? Yeah, so I think— so in some senses, there is a case to be made for a more ethnographic approach to public health. But Alexis, I think we know, as Rob says, a little bit more already about what trusted sources of authority are. I mean, one, we can't leave any stone unturned in that, you know, on the one hand, we know where do people go to for health advice. Is it their, you know, local primary care provider? Is it their pediatrician? But we also know, for instance, that an association that research has shown is that prior to the COVID pandemic, we knew that people who believed in traditional or alternative forms of medicine, which in itself is a kind of little bit of oxymoron, traditional or alternative, are less likely to have expressed confidence in the MMR vaccine. And so we know that there is this, you know, where do you get your information about health? And I think this is intimately connected to this idea of your worldview, because your body is connected to your view of the world. And so I think that's where religion and civil society comes in. So we know that the clergy, church leaders, other forms of religious leaders— so to me, the kind of immediate go-to trustworthy, you know, sources would of course be political leaders, but then also, you know, health leaders or, you know, activists in some ways, as well as religion. But then I think the interesting thing, and the Biden administration early on really put in a lot of money towards this, is to more creatively find these kinds of trusted or influential, so, you know, sports people, NASCAR leaders. I think of the missed opportunity with Dolly Parton quite a lot. You know, she's as close as we get to a secular national American saint. She has been consistently bipartisan and gotten away with it. And she was a big funder of the Moderna vaccine, one of the first to get it. And she reworked Jolene as a kind of ode to vaccines. And so, you know, We know from the AIDS campaign that getting country music musicians on board, getting Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese to together put together commercials that resembled slasher movies to educate a particular demographic about AIDS was really important. And so I think in some senses we can learn from previous public health campaigns, but we can also just broaden our understanding of trusted messengers beyond just the state and to see how the state can kind of work together with this, I think, quite rich repertoire of agents that command varying degrees of trust.
Alexis Madrigal: Peter, I want to put a little spin on this question to you, just incorporate one of the audience questions, which was asking basically about the relationship between vaccine hesitancy and the American for-profit healthcare system. And I was wondering if you saw, you know, in looking across the different countries, whether the degree of state action or control over healthcare in a particular place and having a national healthcare system versus not, and the degree to which that national healthcare system is used, whether that has been one of the factors in the sort of what the difference between the US and some of the other countries that you've been studying.
Peter Loewen: Yeah, let me— I'll say two quick things about it, then I just want to tie back to expertise just for a second. But I'll say that, you know, there are— the US has high degrees of vaccine hesitancy. It's hard to explain national levels of vaccine hesitancy using kind of prior data that we have. So it's not fully helpful to look at other early types of vaccine hesitancy because we've never had national simultaneous synchronous conversations on vaccines all at once. It's mostly people thinking about childhood vaccines, unless you go back to the kind of examples that Perrine is talking about. You've got to go back 100+ years. So France, for example, has very high levels of vaccine hesitancy. It's a very obviously state-centric system for delivering healthcare, and yet there are high levels, high levels there. So there are a lot of paths to high levels of national vaccine hesitancy, and there are a lot of paths to high levels of vaccine acceptance. To just tie back to the previous comments, they're really important, and I just want to layer on to them two things. 2 things. One is that I think we have to think about the distinction between experts and trusted sources. And that's— and not that Rob and Prerna weren't, they're really raising it, right? But trusted sources work as well as experts. So knowing that whoever it is, that Dale Earnhardt Jr. gets vaccinated, I don't know if he knows much about science. He sure knows how to drive a car. But if you trust him as a person, then maybe you'll listen to him. And that's all to the good. But the second piece is, is that I think that we have to really have a retrospection on how we do scientific communication in democracies. And I just want to give you one example from Canada, which is a really telling one. We have 4 vaccines approved in Canada: J&J, AstraZeneca, Moderna, Pfizer. And we got a lot of AstraZeneca at the start, and we had a national action, a National Advisory Committee on Immunization. Just, it's just a stand-up body of the federal government, good scientists on it. They started opining opinion without any legal authority. They're not a regulatory body on AstraZeneca. And they were able through their— really through their leadership in the discussion with AstraZeneca and blood clots to drive down brand-specific willingness to take AstraZeneca from 90% to 60% in a 6-week period. And who did they do it among? Not among the vaccine hesitant. They did it among people who trust expertise, are concerned about COVID read news about COVID and are likely to defer to government Now, was their position on the vaccine correct or not? It's actually a very complicated question because you have to fold in a bunch of equilibrium assumptions about, you know, what other vaccines are available and what the real risks are and what the risk of COVID is, conditional on infection. It's not simple, but they communicated a certain viewpoint and they drove down people's willingness to take something that would save their life from COVID and would prevent them from hospitalization. So how we kind of— how we come up with a system where experts can give advice, but we balance it off against all the other myriad considerations that you have when you're talking about public health, I think is a really complicated question for democracies. And the first thing we should be doing is, you know, not falling into the trap of saying we're going to defer to experts on everything, and that includes social scientists, obviously, as well.
Alexis Madrigal: Good question from the audience. A follow-up on the interesting points raised by Purna on factors such as trust and actors impacting vaccine hesitancy. I'm interested to know Alexis's views— oh, why, thank you— on the role of media in this. Where in the spectrum of trust would you currently place our media outlets, and what could be done to further improve that position? I mean, I think there's a couple of ways to think about this. I think that there's at least 2, maybe 3 universes of media that are pretty almost don't even touch anymore. One is the one that we oftentimes talk about, which is, say, like the right-wing media world, which has sort of developed its own sort of closed system of ways of talking. And also, it's even really its own social platform. So like at this point, Facebook in the United States is more or less like a right-wing platform. And the most popular links are things that are coming out of the sort of right-wing ecosystem. Then you kind of have, let's call it, the New York Times/National Public Radio kind of audience, which are people who consider themselves informed and read a lot of newspapers and things. And they have fairly decent levels of trust in the media, it seems to me. And they pay attention to us, and they are interested in what reporters have to say about the facts. And then there's just like this kind of vast pool of somewhat disinterested people of all ages and ideologies who are mostly in it for the entertainment, whether they're watching like TikToks or ESPN or whatever they're doing, or they're they're just watching CBS sitcoms, you know. And I think that to me, one of the things that's really tough is to realize that even our, like, widest reach, most respected kind of political news, and news more broadly, are sort of missing huge swaths of the American public who are more or less uninterested in sort of what we're doing. And I sometimes think that almost a bigger question is sort of the one that Peter has raised earlier, which is we can do a lot by doing better reporting, and I believe in trying to be good at it, etc., etc. But I want to know the other side of this more. I want to know on the reader, how are people figuring out what to do, particularly low-information folks? You know, you see this in the lead-up to every election. You know, you've had some subset of the population that's been following every single minute detail of everything. And then they stick a mic in front of 10 people's faces, you know, at the polls, and they're like, "Oh no, Biden seems like a good dude." And then like, that's who they, you know, and so the difference between that actually huge pool of Americans, it's maybe that's a lack of trust, maybe that's a lack of interest, maybe that's just sort of when you unbundle newspapers, you can't get people to read the real news along with the sports. I love sports, but just saying, it's not really real news. And I don't know how you solve that problem now. I really don't. I don't know that there is really a solution. And I think of it as an even deeper problem about sort of information flows, particularly in democratic societies. Peter, while we're here, there's a question for you from the audience. In your work looking at politicians across multiple countries, do you see any relationship between systematic patterns between COVID management and politician characteristics?
Peter Loewen: That's a good question. I don't— I'll just tell a funny anecdote, which to go back to Danny Kahneman and CASBS, and then I'll actually link it into this. But Kahneman and Tversky years ago came up with a question to test people's decision-making under different frames. And they called it the Asian disease question. And it was a problem in which you had a mysterious disease coming from Asia. Asia, which is going to kill a certain number of people, and the decision maker had to decide whether to take a certain number of deaths with certainty or take a gamble over a lot of deaths or no deaths. And as it turns out, I administered that question to about 400 politicians in 4 countries a few years ago. And what came out of that was that if you look at the patterns of how citizens respond to that question, that they're much more willing to take risks when they think about people dying rather than the people they would save. Politicians responded in exactly the same way. They made exactly the same— they exhibited the exact same behavioral biases that citizens exhibit. And I think that at the core of that little anecdote is the insight that we are actually relying on human beings to solve these problems for us. And I think a lot about what goes on with these politicians when their advisor who's responsible for long-term stuff finally gets to them at the end of the day. They've spent all day dealing with putting out fires, and finally the person who's been given the task of getting schools open in 6 months comes into the office and says, "Governor or Premier, I really need you to focus now on this thing that's going to happen 6 months from now." And she says, "I've been at this all day. I don't have time to think about this right now. I've got a crisis I have to deal with right now." We have democratic systems that at the core of them have people, whether it's expert advisors or politicians at the top. And I think that we have to think about how well those systems are actually able to plan for the short, medium, and the long term, particularly when you're right in the maws of a crisis. Now, there are some governments that have done it better than others. And you can look at countries that have been more successful. And I think it actually is really worth looking at the ones that have been successful and trying to draw some lessons from there. And Perrenne's work actually is very good insight into how it was done differentially. And it's a story of leadership in some ways 100 years ago. But even today, it's worth taking a look look at New Zealand and understanding why Jacinda Ardern was able to really marshal a coalition and a consensus around how to respond to something other politicians haven't been able to do it. Now, the final thing I'll say is that it's pretty automatic. If you look across countries and try to figure out why some did better than others, electoral systems don't explain it. Unfortunately, the gender of leaders doesn't explain it. It would be nice if we could parse that out, out econometrically, but it doesn't stand up to the evidence. So there's no secret yet about what mix of institutions get us there.
Adrian Raftery: Yeah, I just to— yeah, to follow up on that, I think that, you know, one thing that is important, I think, is, you know, the priorities and national priorities for things, because if you look again to take, you know, data and provision of data as an example, you know, the United States The United States does some things very well in terms of data, and they're the things that we kind of nationally really care about on an ongoing basis. So for example, the unemployment rate, you know, that's quarterly, it's put out. There's a huge amount of attention to it. If it goes up, it's, you know, a big crisis. If it goes down, there's satisfaction. The inflation rate is the same. These are monitored on a regular basis by, for example, the US Census Bureau, who does large and extensive surveys of the population. The American Community Survey is an example which interviews something like, I think, 100,000 people a month about whether they're unemployed and many other things. And actually, that's something— there's no reason that that shouldn't be done for health surveillance either. And one thing that I think could be done, the ACS, the American Community Survey, a small subset of that could be every month. People could be zero prevalence, people could be tested for COVID or whatever else. And that way we'd have a kind of— of course, there are difficulties with that of privacy and so on, but these are, I think, surmountable. And then we would have a regular tracking of the health status of the population in the way we do of unemployment, we do of inflation, and we do have a lot of other things that we actually take really seriously. But I think health clearly you know, it's a— there's a kind of revealed preference. We don't take it as seriously. There are actually, in terms of tracking things, the state of Indiana has done, you know, they've done regular representative surveys of the entire population to track, you know, the level of COVID And that is— and it's essentially Ohio has done a bit of it, but these are the only two states that have done it. And I think really, you know, the country should follow the lead of Indiana in that. And they've done a very impressive job, which I think should be should be replicated nationally, and, you know, it can be done. So I think there's not just— there are some of the issues that have been talked about here are very important, but I think, you know, what priorities is given to things. I think maybe, you know, in some other countries, maybe health is a higher priority, which may— a higher national priority, which may, you know, explain some differences.
Alexis Madrigal: I don't know. I had As we're getting into our overtime segment here, I wanted to— there was a quite disturbing study that actually was published April of 2020, in which they had done a tabletop simulation with a bunch of health leaders and experts, in fact, many of the people who ended up running the response. One of the things that came out of that study was that they had given these leaders some unrealistic data in the tabletop simulation, which none of them questioned. And in fact, they attributed the fall-off of the number of cases to their own excellent management of the crisis, even though that didn't match up with what they should have expected out of this— in this particular tabletop simulation. And so the authors of this report, which again released April 1st, basically were like, we need to build in more reflexive thinking and more critical thinking about the sort of data that's coming in. And as I was reading it, it occurred to me that social science really has this incredible gift for the scientific and public health communities. And so I wanted to just do a quick little round the horn here. On what sort of a social scientific advice or principle can or should be brought to bear within public health and the medical infrastructure. Let me start, Rob, Brenna, Adrienne, Peter. Sure.
Rob Willer: So I mean, the first thing that comes to mind for me is just study, systematically study everything. If the government's doing something, there are social and behavioral scientists who will help them study its efficacy Even, I mean, the ideal is if they can somehow randomize whatever they're doing so it could be studied in a rigorous experimental sort of way. But even if it's not, there's all sorts of ways that we can attack it to try to get some sort of insights on it. Right now we're working on trying to analyze the effects of the lotteries, the state lotteries as incentives for vaccination. And, you know, some people have been like, oh, are you studying that to just to quantify how much they're helping? Because the early journalistic reports have been so overwhelmingly positive and for good reason, right? It rhymes with common sense that the lotteries would fit well to possibly the profiles of vaccine hesitant or certain vaccine hesitant populations. And we're like, no, we don't actually know that these do anything. We don't know until we do the analysis. We just don't know. And in our early research, it's not so far a slam dunk that they're making a big difference. We don't know. We're not done doing this research, and we'll only be able to offer a partial take on it. But one of the things is when a government does one thing, they often stop doing other things. And so whatever it is that they're doing should be systematically assessed by people who can help them. And honestly, there's a ton of volunteer labor just sitting out there that would love to do this. And it would help us make more evidence-based decisions.
Prerna Singh: Just tagging on to what Rob said, I think the pitch that I would make is, again, COVID is not our first, sadly not going to be our last pandemic. We have experience with pandemics. We have experience with successfully controlling pandemics and vaccinating and attaining herd immunity against diseases like smallpox, which was deadly for millions of people. And so what I think, again, systematically going back and historically saying what worked, because in some ways the information environment has changed completely. The political environment is very different. But to some extent, you know, this goes back to Peter's point about behavioral bias We remain the same humans. And so what motivates us? Why do we act? I think there's a lot to learn from studying the past. And I think a lot to learn that is a little counterintuitive and that almost goes against our own image of ourselves, this slightly hubristic image of us as being, you know, as being— we have instrumental, rational, cost-maximizing calculations. We know that we just react reason in far more complicated ways. And I think we kind of miss the fact that we are actually motivated into doing a number of things that might not be strictly defined in our own interest. And we do this all the time. We know this from experiments. Most people will mail back a wallet that they find full of money. People do mostly honestly pay their taxes, even though the chances of being caught are relatively minimal. So why, why do we do these things? And I think being able to understand both historical experiences with pandemics and also linking vaccination to other instances. Margaret Levi, who's the head of CASBS, her work on, you know, why did people pay taxes, why did people join and fight in the army, these are all costly sacrifices that we make on an everyday basis for an idea of a collective. And so I think, again, looking at those instances and fitting including public health within this kind of larger category of social science outcomes that we do have some insights on would also be helpful in terms of thinking about ways forward in the pandemic.
Peter Loewen: I would say just 3 quick things about it. One is that, I mean, Rob is right, and Purna is right too, that there's just so much for social scientists to contribute to this. And Rob actually marshaled together a very large number of colleagues to write a great article in Nature Human Behavior at the start of the pandemic, sort of said, look, here's all the stuff we that can be applied now, and we can learn about it in real time, but we can also bring it to bear on the pandemic. So I think that we should recognize there's a role for everyone. Second point is, we should think, though, about what the model is. If we were redoing this from the start and we had some prep, what's the model that we would bring to bear for actually bringing advice to decision makers and for analyzing evidence? And it's been a real free market. It's been a free-for-all, is another way of thinking about it. And that's been to the good in some ways, but there's a lot of knowledge we've left on the table stable, partially because of our institutions, partially because of competitiveness, also because it's just— there's only so many hours in a day. So thinking about that is important. And the third thing that I'll say as a person who spends a lot of time just looking at data and doing experiments is that I think there's a really important role for the humanities in this. And I think it's really important that we recognize that this is a large-scale collective undertaking that is emotionally taxing on people, that has upended people's expectations and views and hopes for the world and the future. And there's a lot of things outside of the social sciences that can help us find meaning in that and understand much more deeply what people are going through. So I think that thinking more deeply about what the role of the arts and what the role of the more humanistic side of our universities are in helping us understand what people are going through and thinking and what's happening right now, not to mention history, history, I think is deeply important for us understanding and making sense of why things have turned out the way they've turned out.
Adrian Raftery: Yeah, I would really agree with that and what's been said. I think that one of the— it's clear, I think, social science has a lot to say and can help a lot in basically framing the national response to events like this. But the question is, how can it be done? I think Peter was really referring to that. And I think actually our experience in the National Academy of Science with the— Sean, with this group which was set up very quickly, and it operates in a completely different way from National Academy of Science usually does in terms of providing, for example, social science advice. The usual thing is, you know, the government says, can you do a report on this? There's a— it kind of takes a year or two, and at the end there's a very impressive massive, long, comprehensive document is put back. And that, you know, maybe it gathers dust on a shelf, or maybe it's actioned on, or maybe people have forgotten about the question by the time it comes out. It's usually of extremely high quality. But what Sean was doing is basically these questions came up, and within probably within a month, we had a report out. And there was— we went through a lot of the same reviews, a lot of the same quality control. The reports were they were a lot shorter. They basically synthesized, you know, what was known, which when you get a group of experts around actually can be done pretty quickly. And people don't have to do a study, you know, original research. They can synthesize the scientific literature. And that was done. I think we've issued maybe a dozen reports now. They've all had, you know, substantial impact on, you know, things like COVID in schools, COVID in prisons, and so on, the meatpacking industry. Industry. And, you know, it turned out, yeah, there were people available who were prepared to put in time at short notice to, you know, communicate what they knew about it. So I think that's, in a sense, a new way of doing things where there's people— the question is now, will that continue? Because, you know, as maybe the urgency declines, but I think we've learned that that's a very, very relevant model, which is very different from the way academics usually work, the way scientists usually work. It does exist to some extent And there's, you know, the US government, there's the National Council of Economic Advisers, which works a bit like that. And, you know, I think there's a case for having something similar for social science to be able to answer questions kind of now or in pretty short order that people would have. And social scientists, we have answers. It's just that there hasn't really been the mechanism, hasn't really been present for, you know, communicating them, you know, quickly and with their ambiguities, because all these reports, they reflect multiple points of view. They reflect the difficult the subtleties, the ambiguities. And actually, it turns out, you know, people, they expect that. They don't want, you know, the one answer. They, but they do want a fairly concise and fast summary of, you know, of the current state of knowledge about this particular question. Wonderful. Well, thank you.
Alexis Madrigal: That seems like an excellent place to end. I have a big thanks to today's panel for the enriching conversation. I learn so much every time I come to CASBS, whether it's virtual or in person. In person. And again, I want to thank this event's co-sponsors, CIFAR, the Pandemic Action Network, Public Policy Forum, Sage Publishing, Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. Thanks again to the panel. Thanks to everyone for joining us today.
Narrator: That was Peter Loewen, Alexis Madrigal, Adrienne Raftery, Purna Singh, and Rob Willard discussing how social science advances our understanding of pandemics. You can learn more about this and other CASBS events by visiting our website at casbs.stanford.edu, or you can find us on Twitter. We're @casbsstanford. The CASBS live event series will take a short break for the rest of the summer, but we've got some terrific original interviews with renowned fellows from CASBS history. So be sure to follow us in your podcast app of choice. You won't want to miss those. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human-centered team, thanks for listening.