I'm taking an ethics class this term, which involves a bunch of reading and written responses to the reading material. Some of the papers in this section relate to the pandemic, some of which go back to Dec. 2020.
I'm not sure exactly what a response to this somewhat disjointed and unrelated material might be--hard to find something to focus on when the topics covered in the module are so disparate--but I think it's going to be something along the lines of not believing something just because some academic in a journal said so.
As relates to the covid pandemic, I've mentioned before I work for a doctor who's our county health authority, so she feeds me all the stuff we are to tell patients when asked. Her info comes from the CDC, mainly. I (we've) watched it change throughout the course of the ordeal. Okay, science nerds do the best they can with what they have at the time, fair enough. Yet I'm losing track of the number of times old-fashioned common sense concerns and ideas, previously labeled conspiracy theories in the moment, later turn out to have merit. At the time it was "arguing with the science" or "denying the science" or whatever.
I see ethical concerns regarding how much news outlets and even the business sector who controls large amounts of people's livelihoods bash people for trying to make their own decisions about their situation and for "not following the science." It ranges from disingenuous and arrogant (thinking you know it all, right now, without ANY longitudinal studies) to outright dangerous (pretending or truly believing you know something for certain that you just don't) and misinformative (presenting everything as binary black and white, i.e, a "conspiracy theory" may be mostly inaccurate yet it does have merit in some circumstances, i.e., everybody take the vaccine or you deny science but in reality, yeah, turns out some people really should not have it, oops). Some of the things one of these papers and opinion pieces stump for have now been debunked several times over. I figure if they're gonna make us all read this stuff and write an ethics-centered response, then I should get to hammer the BS they're having us read.
Hypothetically, we're only supposed to source class material in our critiques, which I will do, but boy do I have some other sources and ideas to throw at them.
