89. THE EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE OF COVID 19 - Checking For Symptoms In The Dark
Read More“Miranda Fricker wrote of what she called “epistemic injustice” - “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower”. She identified two forms of such injustice: “testimonial injustice”, the injustice of denying credibility to someone’s word, and “hermeneutical injustice”, the injustice of disadvantaging someone in their access to interpretive resources and forming an obstacle to their capacity to know. This week a member of Sage, the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, urged the UK to expand its official list of Covid symptoms so that UK citizens could better identify if they have the virus. In this article I intend to show that by ignoring this advice, and keeping the official list of symptoms restricted to a high fever, a new continuous cough, or a loss of sense of smell or taste, the UK government is permitting a continuing epistemic injustice to occur which is causing unnecessary and highly preventable suffering.“