COVID Conversations: What Have We Learned?
In-person and virtual conference at the University of South Florida
December 6, 2024: 5:00 PM - 8:30 PM December 7, 2024: 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Overview
The COVID-19 global pandemic has been the most dramatic, consequential, and controversial medical and public health event of the 21st Century.
USF Health and the USF Heterodox Academy Campus Community are bringing together a diverse group of experts for civil dialogue on issues of COVID origins, medical practice, mitigation strategies, science, policy, and communication.
The conference will begin on the evening of Friday, December 6, featuring an overview by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Dr. Sten Vermund of Yale University and incoming Dean of USF’s College of Public Health. Saturday, December 7, will include a comprehensive group of panels, featuring such well-known scientists as Drs. Alina Chan, Tracy Beth Høeg, and Martin Kulldorff, as well as leading experts from USF in virology, medicine, public health, policy, communication, and philosophy of science. The conversation will address the present state of several controversial but important topics and allow for open exchange.
This is a free event co-sponsored by USF Health, the USF Heterodox Academy Campus Community, and Heterodox Academy (HxA).
Modeling Heterodox Conversations™
COVID Conversations is dedicated to facilitating civil discourse about difficult and contested subjects. Our first goal is to bring together experts on diverse topics related to COVID-19 to discuss what was done well, what was done poorly, and how to do better with future public health situations. Our second and equally important goal is to model productive, nuanced, non-partisan discourse, in the spirit of the Heterodox Academy’s mission of promoting “open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement to improve higher education and academic research.”
To achieve these goals, this event will be structured as a Heterodox Conversation.™ We expect disagreement, and we expect mutual respect, taking the point of view of others seriously and attempting to understand them. Heterodox Academy describes this kind of event in this way:
What distinguishes Heterodox Conversations™ is our approach and our purpose. We focus on the process of academic inquiry, not on opinions. Our speaker pairs will surely disagree on some things, but this isn’t about identifying a winner and loser. Rather, this process highlights how scholars investigate their topic and reach informed conclusions with the available evidence. The goal of the Heterodox Conversations™ is to reveal the process of discovery and reasoning that result in a conclusion. Of course, at the end of our conversation, you may find one person’s evidence or argument relatively more compelling. That’s fine! But we hope you learn more about academic inquiry and continue the process of inquiry by asking more questions and engaging in further study and exploration.
Based on the Heterodox Conversations™ format, each panel will feature two speakers who will present their viewpoints and dialogue with each other and 2-3 panelists, followed by open discussion with in-person participants and questions submitted by virtual participants. Each panel will be moderated by a USF HxA Campus Community member who is also a USF professor.
