
The “I Don’t Know” of Good Governance
by Dr. Jordan Vaughn and Dr. Stewart Tankersley
Three words are essential to science. Three words were missing from our leaders and pundits over the past thirty months. Three words inform patients of integrity. Those words: I Don’t Know.
During this crisis, it was easy for experts to pontificate about their knowledge of information about past phenomena. In many ways, this led to the belief that this information was predictive of the days and months ahead. As news media and governmental officials salivated for a drop of information that might help them understand the crisis, public health officials failed to inform them of the most important concept in the field of medicine and, more specifically, public health, uncertainty. As Michael Osterholm said in a recent California state Senate hearing, the three most important words he uses are: I Don’t Know.
Looking back over the past 24 months in assessing many of our public health authority’s responses as well as press conferences and interviews, the general public was given information constantly, and it was given with the certainty as if the sun was going to rise tomorrow. However, very few of our authorities attempted to transmit the certainty, validity, or reproducibility of this information.
Most of what was being relayed and broadcast was nothing more than consensus opinion or, for that matter, outright conjecture. Amid a crisis, especially with the outbreak of an entirely new disease, it is to be expected that much of the response is opinion based, and even with ‘expert’ modeling, the results are always just speculation. The problem lies in failing to communicate the truth, which is, that we don’t know.
Archives
- February 2025
- January 2025
- December 2024
- September 2024
- August 2024
- July 2024
- January 2023
- December 2022
- November 2022
- October 2022
- September 2022
- August 2022
- July 2022
- June 2022
- May 2022
- April 2022
- March 2022
- February 2022
- January 2022
- December 2021
- November 2021
- October 2021
- September 2021
- August 2021
Calendar
M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | ||||||
2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
30 |
Leave a Reply