Socially-distanced science: how British publics were imagined, modelled and marginalised in political and expert responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

In early 2021, the United Kingdom (UK) had the highest per capita death rate from Covid-19 of any large country. Yet it had previously been ranked as one of the best prepared countries for a future pandemic. This gap between preparedness and performance has been the subject of intense debate, including as part of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry. In this paper, we contribute to this ongoing process of reflection by identifying the imagined public(s) within the UK’s scientific advice system. Drawing on scholarship in Science and Technology Studies (STS) that critiques framings of a singular or homogeneous ‘public’, we review meeting minutes and media briefings to reveal two imagined publics, co-constructed by the UK’s science advisors and policymakers in early 2020: first, a ‘freedom-loving’ public resistant to stringent policy interventions; and second, a public that was—in an echo of wartime rhetoric— ‘all in it together’. These imagined publics reflect a series of framing assumptions that help to make sense of the UK’s pandemic response. We focus particularly on the tensions between the homogeneous and multi-faceted imagined public, and the compound health and social inequalities that predated the pandemic but became starker and more visible as it unfolded. Our paper charts these tensions and demonstrates how these imagined publics went through stages of cohesion and fracture in the fraught early months of the pandemic. We conclude by considering the implications of this analysis for understanding the UK’s response to Covid-19, and for the future of scientific advice and emergency preparedness. Why does this matter? Studies of scientific advice reveal that how scientists and decision makers imagine the public and their concerns affect the communication of scientific advice, and the construction and value placed on relevant knowledge. Advisory scientists frame their models and their advice in terms of what they regard as politically possible.