State of the Faculty Address 2020

22 Lessons of COVID-19 and the Limitations of Science and Medicine For all of HKUMed’s scientific successes of which I immodestly boasted at the beginning of my report, there are of course lacunae and important lessons to reflect on. Foremost, COVID-19 has exposed one of the gravest chasms of health-related inequity. Socioeconomic gradients of risk exposure, infection and death have been unjustly steep. The attack rate in Singapore’s migrant worker dormitories is 400 times that of the local general community. “Black Lives Matter” in the US has been exacerbated by unevenly distributed COVID-19 burdens imposed on poor African-American communities and in prisons that remain disproportionately populated by people of colour. Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic or BAME groups are unfairly overrepresented amongst British COVID-19 sufferers. Worse still, the magnitude of adverse risk for India’s migrant workers, overlaid on the age-old caste system, has remained unmeasured; they suffer the indignity of literally not being counted. What of Hong Kong? In The COVID-19 Catastrophe , Richard Horton, who edits The Lancet , reminded us of the late German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s damning criticism of the scientific establishment’s “over-specialised division of labour, (their) concentration on methodology and theory, (their) externally determined abstinence from practice” having rendered us “entirely incapable of reacting adequately to civilisational risks”. “Techno-scientific rationality” can only take us so far. Beyond the narrow confines of medicine and health, COVID-19 will almost certainly usher in a new way of relating to each other and living together. Slavoj Žižek, the supercharged Slovenian philosopher, speculated about a new form of “communism” emerging, mostly in the communitarian sense of the term, in his new work Pandemic: COVID-19 Shakes the World . Remarkably this form of state-led collectivism has taken hold in the heartlands of neoliberal democracies, the US and Europe, and has by and large been popularly accepted, even demanded. Governments the world over have invoked the ongoing disaster to commandeer hotels for quarantine, nationalise stockpiles of personal protective equipment and guarantee minimum survival of the unemployed by minting new currency – in essence by abandoning market