On June 1st, Dr Benjamin Smart joined CHHS members to discuss ‘How Covid-19 has brought to light the failure of One-Size-Fits-All approaches to public health’.
Abstract: Since late 2019, every country in the world has been battling the largest pandemic in a century. Covid-19 has infected nearly 500 million people worldwide, and killed 6 million of those (and the real figures for both deaths and infections are no doubt substantially higher). To combat the pandemic, nations put in place a variety of measures to slow the spread of the disease, including, in some cases, measures that all but shut down their economies (both formal and informal). This followed blanket advice from the World Health Organisation (WHO), which recommended strict lockdown policies on a global scale.
In this paper, Smart questioned the WHO recommendations. Evidence Based Public Health Policy guidelines emphasise the importance of cultural context when making policy decisions, and yet these considerations were largely ignored during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Countries were faced with a choice between more or less drastic measures to ‘flatten the curve’, but with a disease that rarely affected the young, one must wonder whether implementing measures that would inevitably lead to malnutrition and starvation for millions of people in Africa, as well as severely disrupting existing healthcare programmes on a continent where only 3% of the population are over 65, could have possibly been justified given the typical disease course of Covid-19 in the young.
Suppose you had a choice between two health policies, A and B. Policy A would result in the death of a lot of elderly people, and Policy B would result in the death of a lot of children, especially infants. Which would you choose?
Bio: Dr Benjamin Smart is an associate professor in philosophy. Prior to joining the University of Johannesburg in 2015 he lectured at The University of Birmingham (in the United Kingdom). He received his PhD from Nottingham University in 2012.
Smart’s research focuses on the metaphysics of laws and causation, and on the philosophy of medicine. He published a monograph entitled ‘Concepts and Causes in the Philosophy of Disease’ in 2016, and has numerous papers in highly ranked international philosophy journals. He has published articles on the metaphysics of least action principles, the problem of induction, the nature of fundamental properties, the philosophy of sport, and on the philosophy of health and disease.
Dr Smart believes that philosophical work in medicine can have a direct impact on society, and so also collaborates with academics in the medical sciences to address what some might call ‘real world problems’ in public health.