Science in the Time of Covid-19
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 March 2021
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Covid-19 pandemic has seen the best of science and the worst of science. New vaccines have been produced in less than twelve months. But at the same time we’ve seen evidence exaggerated and undermined, falsified, and flawed. Scientists arguing in public over areas of policy that have reached into all of our lives in an unprecedented way. There has never been so much “science”. But the pandemic has seen science politicised and polarised in ways some of us could never imagine. In this episode of Analysis, Sonia Sodha explores what the pandemic has revealed about the practice of science, and our relationship with it.
Producer: Gemma Newby Editor: Jasper Corbett
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts. |
| 0:42.0 | There have been retraction of false claims, doubling down on obvious errors, |
| 0:47.6 | on dignified social media spats. No, this isn't a programme about what politicians have got wrong in this pandemic. |
| 0:55.0 | It's about science in the era of COVID. |
| 0:58.0 | This is not just any science which is being called into play, |
| 1:02.0 | this is science that affects the texture of ordinary life the worst of science. |
| 1:21.0 | Several effective vaccines in just over 12 months are remarkable |
| 1:25.6 | scientific feet, but they've also been some major bloopers. Eminent scientists |
| 1:31.8 | telling us COVID-19 is nothing to worry about. |
| 1:35.0 | Top scientific advisors warning us masks are probably harmful |
| 1:40.0 | before making them compulsory. |
| 1:42.0 | Widely reported epidemiological predictions. before making them compulsory. |
| 1:42.5 | Widely reported epidemiological predictions |
| 1:45.2 | that half of us had had COVID back in March 2020 |
| 1:49.0 | that proved to be dangerously out. |
... |
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