"Think Big": Beyond Medicalization of the COVID-19 Pandemic Response

Almost all public debates on the government's response to Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in South Korea have revolved around a pair of keywords: whether the current response is "Scientific " as opposed to previous one often considered "Political ". The former refers to a scientifically-oriented one, which is often called evidence-based medicine. Meanwhile, the latter is meant to indicate an ideologically-motivated approach to the coronavirus crisis, which has been thus blamed for its inappropriateness in guiding public health measures. Yet as Bill Roper, a former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, succinctly pointed out, the notion of "We need to get the politics out of public health " is not only "Never going to happen " but also "naive " at best.(1) His remarks becomes more evident when we consider the COVID-19 pandemic a science-related public controversy.(2) It means that SARS-Cov-2 is a pathogen which has to be scientifically examined, while COVID-19 it causes has a huge impact on the everyday lives of the public both directly and in real time. Policymakers are thus required to inform their citizens about the rationale of how to cope with the crisis as well as to receive inputs from the society as a whole. That is why the pandemic response should be seen as a public health enterprise in which trade-offs among "Conflicting values, competing economic and personal interests, and group or organizational loyalties " are carefully negotiated, with the government's legitimacy being secured.(2,3) All of this falls under one we commonly call politics, which we here define as the process by which policymakers along with experts discuss over who gets what, thereby proposing compromisable policy options.(4) Once again in Roper's words, that is "The best way we make decisions in a democratic society " where "We need science - the best of the science - to guide the decisions made by political leaders to implement effective public health programs. "(1)