Counterproductive contributions to African epidemiology

Lauer, Helen; Shenton, Joan

doi:10.18689/mjim-1000108

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The global scientific community, where the received 'scientific consensus' emerges, is often diametrically opposed to judgments proffered independently by experts with the greatest epistemic advantage within the global community of health specialists, due to their proximity and familiarity with the totality of relevant data about African contagions. The widely publicized West African Ebola outbreak and intervention efforts in 2014-2016 will serve here as two cases in point; but of course there are many other such cases (Lauer and Shenton 2017).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Scientific Consensus, Doctrinal Paradox and Discursive Dilemma

Lauer

2022

Thought pract.

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Global ignorance about Africa continues to sustain inappropriate global interventions to resolve public health crises, often with disastrous consequences. To explain why this continues to happen, I marshal two theorems that predict basic statistical properties, called ‘the doctrinal paradox’ and ‘the discursive dilemma’, which underlie scientific consensus formation and evidence-based decision making on a global scale. These mathematical results illuminate the epistemic and material injustices committed by the protocols of medical research conducted at the highest level of global knowledge production in the service of international humanitarian aid for Africans. These social choice theorems reveal that a global scientific consensus projecting claims and proposing policies about Africa’s disease burden is likely to yield a low degree of reliability, in that the probability of its accuracy is less than chance. The solution to this anomaly is to remove from the global scientific agenda the statistically unrealisable demand of satisfying too many multinational corporate and foreign governments’ priorities as equally entitled to benefit from the knowledge produced to improve Africa’s public health sector. Instead, foreign funding targeted to support medical science and policy in Africa should be directed by those specialists in situ who are most familiar with their own national health challenges and potential solutions, rather than relying upon foreign decision makers to interpret Africa’s emergency public health care needs. Keywords Doctrinal paradox, discursive dilemma, scientific consensus, epistemic trust, global health ethics, group agency

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For a detailed account of this common background of implicit beliefs, seeLauer and Shenton (2017) andLauer (2017a).…”

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Scientific Consensus, Doctrinal Paradox and Discursive Dilemma

Lauer

2022

Thought pract.

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How to do things with insecure extensions

Lauer

2023

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The multi-purpose of publicizing a scientific consensus includes a communicative strategy by which scientific institutions accommodate the weighty social and economic demands to demonstrate they are collaborating and cooperating with non-scientific sectors of society, relying on a wide range of spokespeople and representatives to carry out the delivery of their consensus in formal, institutionally arranged, professional and impersonal public settings. I investigate the conditions and presuppositions that make it possible for a research consortium to contribute indirectly to public discourse beyond the presentation of empirical data and theoretical speculations routinely associated with knowledge-producing collectives. The baptismal action of researchers in selecting a designative name to announce a new discovery of virus species and species variants does not follow the rigorous regulations that standardize all names of taxonomic categories in other biological sciences as well as higher order taxa in virology. It is argued here that the lack of clarity in the denotation of the term ‘Ebola’ (in epidemiological reports from West Africa throughout 2014–2016) serves the purpose of shifting a receptor’s understanding of a statement from its explicit assertive point to an implicit declarative, commissive, directive or expressive, covertly delivered point. Specialists of nomenclature concerned with quality assurance regard this lapse in standardization as a consequence of human fallibility demanding urgent intervention. Here it is proposed instead that the occlusive effect of a technical descriptive name may serve an important communicative function.

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“Let’s say it wears an Ebola Coat, but it’s not Ebola”: The Rhetoric and Politics of Reframing a Vaccine for a Transnational Clinical Trial

Thiongane,

Bamba,

Sawadogo

et al. 2024

anthropologica

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Focusing on how disease, health and vaccine research take on different forms, meanings and interpretations in diverse contexts, we examine the use of rhetoric to recruit people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa for an Ebola vaccine clinical trial. Conducted after the West African Ebola outbreak in a country that had not been affected by Ebola, the urgency, relevance and materiality of disease, health and biomedical research takes on different shapes, meanings and understandings. The limitations of multilateral initiatives to address inequalities in associated healthcare and access to essential medicines and vaccines highlight the tensions created when neither local researchers nor patient communities have been involved in the design or planning of the trial, and when the pathologies targeted by experimental technologies are either inappropriate for the people they are aimed at, or unfold without the knowledge of a social consensus. By deciphering the metaphorical discourse on an Ebola vaccine candidate and the erasure of a viral ontology from the hybrid technology to which it gives rise, we understand that the discourse of clinic staff makes it possible to establish a scientific truth in the service of instrumental productivity: manufacturing consent and recruiting arms for vaccine shots. In this article, we show that the closure of biomedicine to an esoteric discourse reflects the weakness of science in communicating what it actually does and the techniques it produces. It also addresses the failure of community engagement in the field of emerging infectious diseases.

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Counterproductive contributions to African epidemiology

Cited by 3 publications

References 42 publications

Scientific Consensus, Doctrinal Paradox and Discursive Dilemma

Scientific Consensus, Doctrinal Paradox and Discursive Dilemma

How to do things with insecure extensions

“Let’s say it wears an Ebola Coat, but it’s not Ebola”: The Rhetoric and Politics of Reframing a Vaccine for a Transnational Clinical Trial

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