Politics in Search of Evidence. The role of Political Philosophy and Public Health in the political responses to COVID-19

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The COVID-19 pandemic represents an unprecedented challenge for societies worldwide. One challenge is that political decisions must be made under conditions of extreme uncertainty. An evidence-based politics (EBP) is often proposed as a response to theCOVID-19 pandemic. However, the debates since the outbreak of the pandemic have also shown that it is unclear what exactly such an EBP is and might look like. To develop a convincing political answer to the pandemic, it is necessary to clarify this concept. Therefore, the project uses an interdiscipilanry approach between political philosophy and public health. Political philosophy has been dealing with global crises (such as climate change) and how politics should react to them. Against this theoretical background, the philosophical subproject will analyse the concept of EBP in terms of its inherent models of science, the relationship between science and politics and the underlying normative assumptions. The science of public health and its core discipline epidemiology has received a lot of attention in the COVID-19 pandemic but views as to how political public health scientists should be varies. The aim of the public health subproject is to reflect the relationship between public health science and politics by interviews with scientific representatives from epidemiology and document analysis of published position papers and policy briefs from relevant scientific societies. For a comprehensive reflection of EBP, the project chooses an interdisciplinary perspective. By integrating political philosophy and public health, the project recon-structs, analyses and criticizes the concept of EBP from an interdisciplinary perspective. This allows to develop and justify a comprehensive EBP model for a convincing political response during the COVID-19 and future pandemics.