Rationing, Data, and the Ethics of our Decisions
Lessons from a life in public health
Having quality data is paramount to how we make decisions to combat COVID-19. The decisions made now at an institutional level have life-and-death consequences, as do the choices we make around individual actions like social distancing.
In the midst of today’s pandemic, I wish we still had Dr. Bill Bicknell, one of my professors from the Boston University School of Public Health, who passed in 2012. He worked in public health policy, program implementation, and clinical medicine around the world, and served as Massachusetts Commissioner of Public Health. He spoke truth to power, he didn’t shy away from challenging authority, and he wasn’t afraid to call “horseshit.”
As a teacher drawing on decades of his own experiences, he forced us to think about how public health data and decisions impact human lives, and to remember the people not at the table. What I learned from him shaped my worldview around the ethics of the decisions we make in healthcare and how we, as data visualization designers, inform those decisions with our charts, graphs, and maps.
Here are three lessons from his last lecture that we should all revisit today.
