How should we think about trust during the pandemic? (Sabina Leonelli)

By Sabina Leonelli

The pandemic has thrown questions around both scientific and public trust into the spotlight. On the one hand, attempts to manipulate public trust in government have often been accompanied by very serious lapses in such trust (e.g. the Cummings scandal in the UK, Trump’s invitation to drink bleach). On the other hand, trust in science has been hailed as bottom line in the COVID-19 response, despite the conflicting and confusing insights emerging from a very fragmented scientific community. In the Webinar conversation “Calculating Trust” hosted by the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of the University of Cambridge on May 28, I discussed such issues with leading experts in the history of statistics and computation Ted Porter, Staffan Mueller-Wille and Stephanie Dick.