Robert Dingwall

Robert Dingwall FAcSS
Born	Robert William James Dingwall (1950-08-06) 6 August 1950
Nationality	British
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Cambridge University of Aberdeen
Thesis	The social organisation of health visitor training (1974)
Academic work
Discipline	Sociology
Sub-discipline	Medical sociology sociology of law Sociology of science
Institutions	University of Aberdeen Faculty of Law, University of Oxford Wolfson College, Oxford University of Nottingham

Robert William James Dingwall FAcSS (born 6 August 1950) is a British sociologist and academic, specialising in medical sociology. He has been Professor of Sociology at Nottingham Trent University since 1990. His research is on the interdisciplinary study of law, medicine, science and technology.

Early life and education

Dingwall was born on 6 August 1950. He attended the independent St Peter's School, York from 1963 to 1968.

At St John's College, Cambridge, Dingwall studied economics for part I of the Tripos and then switched to social and political science for part II, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1971: as per tradition, his BA was promoted to a Master of Arts (MA Cantab) degree. He then studied medical sociology at the University of Aberdeen, graduating with a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 1974. His doctoral thesis was titled "the social organisation of health visitor training".

Career

From 1975 to 1977, after completing his doctorate, Dingwall was a research fellow in the Institute of Medical Sociology at the University of Aberdeen. From 1978 to 1990, he worked at the University of Oxford: he was a research officer, then senior research officer, and finally a research fellow at its Centre for Socio-Legal Studies and Wolfson College, Oxford. He has been Professor of Sociology at the Nottingham Trent University since 1990, where he founded the Institute for Science and Society. He was elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) in 2002: he was a member of its council from 2013 to 2019. He is an Honorary Member of the Faculty of Public Health.

He has served on NERVTAG, a scientific advisory panel for epidemic preparedness of HMG. He has chaired the Bioscience for Society Strategy Panel of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and previously served as a member of the Committee on Ethical Aspects of Pandemic Influenza and of the Civil Justice Council. He has also been a consultant to industry on the ethical use of pharmaceuticals. He has also received commissions from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and the Food Standards Agency.

Public engagement (COVID-19)

In early May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dingwall was interviewed by a journalist at the Daily Telegraph over the Government's coronavirus warnings. He opined that:

We have this very strong message which has effectively terrorised the population into believing that this is a disease that is going to kill you. And mostly it isn't. Eighty per cent of the people who get this infection will never need to go near a hospital. The ones who do go to hospital because they are quite seriously ill most of them will come out alive – even those who go into intensive care. We have completely lost sight of that in the obsession with deaths, the human interest stories about deaths, the international comparisons about death rates, the opportunities for intrepid television journalists to put on lots of PPE and go into high tech where people are acutely ill. All of that helps to create this climate of fear...

In the same interview, Dingwall stressed that:

There is a fair degree of consensus now among people who are more expert on these things than I am that outdoor transmission is negligible... Fleeting contacts are really irrelevant – if a jogger runs past you in the park, this is not a big deal.

On 18 July, Dingwall criticised another SAGE report, which forecasted 120,000 deaths from COVID-19 in wintertime 2020–21. In his estimation "was based on flawed mathematics" and created an "environment of fear". By 31 March 2021, there had been a total of 89,588 deaths from laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in the United Kingdom.