U.S. fails getting social science right in fight with COVID-19: official

NEW YORK, July 8 (Xinhua) -- U.S. scientists and public health officials have mostly nailed the medical response to the COVID-19 pandemic and continually adapted the safety guidelines and treatment plans accordingly, but often fail to communicate effectively about those shifts, reported CNBC on Thursday.

"We got the biological science right, but we didn't get the social science right," Ashish Jha, the White House's COVID-19 response coordinator, was quoted as saying last week at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen, Colorado.

The medical response to COVID-19 has been impressive in creating and producing vaccines as well as therapeutic drugs, but frequent changes to the nation's safety guidelines, particularly early in the pandemic, torpedoed many people's faith in official messaging around COVID-19, according to the report.

Jha highlighted one particularly frustrating fact: The country's initial COVID-19 guidelines weren't even based on the coronavirus itself. The virus was too new for scientists to know much about it yet, so public health agencies crafted their recommendations from their knowledge of a seemingly comparable virus: the flu.

The inability, or unwillingness, to communicate that fact in those early pandemic days could have far-reaching consequences, Jha said, noting that public health officials, including himself, should make concerted efforts to lay everything out on the table.