From The Lancet to Duterte: How COVID-19 Scientific Articles Figured in Policy and Public Discourse in the Philippines

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, political leaders and public health institutions alike invoked “science” and “evidence” in their responses, and knowledge translation throughout the health crisis has been a vibrant field of scholarship. But how did specific bits of scientific knowledge (e.g., journal articles) find their way to policy and public discourses, traversing different geographic, political, and epistemic registers in the process? Drawing inspiration from STS insights on the performativity of scientific evidence and the nature of expertise, this paper tackles this question by making case studies out of three Lancet articles invoked by various actors in the Philippines to justify—or criticize—government responses to the pandemic. Taken together, the case studies on face shield mandates, pandemic response evaluations, and debates over airborne transmission illuminate how the articles shaped—and were shaped by—the country's realities, and how their meanings and implications were mediated by local health experts, journalists, and government officials. By reflecting upon the relationship between science and authoritarian and populist statecraft, this analysis illuminates the stakes involved in what counts as “evidence” and “expertise” amid crisis and in postcolonial contexts, underscoring the urgency not only of decolonizing global health knowledge but deconstructing its myriad (and unexpected) circulations.