Evidence, not opinions to address the health emergency

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the difficulties of interpreting and communicating scientific results, as well as the abuse of terms such as truth, certainty, objective reality and the often poorly thought-out overlap of probabilistic and deterministic mechanisms. The problem arises in particular for "multifactorial diseases" in which infectious agents, environmental risk factors and lifestyles come into play. To start again on a different footing, it would be useful to equip ourselves with multidisciplinary participation tools between the human and social sciences and the "hard" sciences, underpinning which to place the sharing of ethical principles and democratic values before even defining the objectives.