This policy brief is part of CIGI’s project on freedom of thought: Legitimate Influence or Unlawful Manipulation? Find out more at: www.cigionline.org/fot
Policy Brief No. 2 — January 2024
Protecting Freedom of Thought and Public Health in a Pandemic Adrian R. Levy and Peter Suma Key Points → Safeguarding the public’s safety and wellbeing during an infectious disease outbreak is challenging and requires the sharing of timely, accurate information to minimize the risk of acquiring and transmitting disease. → During the COVID-19 global pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) and governments in Canada used social media to protect the public by disseminating information about the virus’s risk and to explain public health and social measures. However, social media also amplified messages of misinformation and accelerated their spread. → As Canada updates its pandemic readiness infrastructure in response to its experience with COVID-19, the right to freedom of thought offers a framework for establishing objective standards for public health infrastructure and processes in a pandemic.
Introduction At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments worldwide implemented emergency powers to minimize harms from a novel and deadly coronavirus spread by pre-symptomatic cases in populations lacking pre-existing immunity (Bedford et al. 2020). The rapidity with which public health and social measures were implemented in Canada1 meant that officials were simultaneously interpreting scientific evidence, making risk management decisions, and communicating with the public. Canadian chief public health officers became household names while presenting public health and social measures during peaks of COVID-19 and then stressing the imperative for immunization (Lowe et al. 2022).2 Unlike previous pandemics, the COVID-19 public health crisis occurred in an “infodemic”3 with social media
1
Within four weeks of the first death from COVID-19, the federal government implemented international border controls including screening, advisories, restrictions banning non-essential travel, and quarantine and isolation orders, while provincial and territorial governments imposed social distancing, stay-athome directives, masking mandates, and school and business closures (McCoy et al. 2020).
2
One provincial chief medical officer of health attracted beatific attention from journalistic hagiographers (see Porter 2020).
3
The WHO was so concerned about the high levels of misinformation circulating on the topic of the virus and the disease that it coined the term infodemic to describe the situation in February 2020, even before declaring COVID-19 to be a pandemic. See Tedros (2020).