Humility is critical in science communication: lessons from the UN’s recent report on child mortality estimates

Abstract

The United Nations announced a historic milestone in global child mortality in March 2024, with deaths among children less than 5 years falling below 5 million in 2022. While this news is welcome, the headline news is too definitive and masks uncertainties in the results. The UN’s projections rely heavily on modeled estimates based on historical data, with only 5% of the 2022 estimate derived from countries with actual data for that year. The model also fails to account for the potential temporal discontinuity caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and is inconsistent with related data on declining vaccination rates. This critique calls for greater humility in communicating the uncertainties inherent in such projections and emphasizes the need for more robust, empirically grounded estimates to inform global health policy. The UN’s role as a science communicator should be to provide clear, evidence-based insights while acknowledging the limitations of its methodology.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1186/s41256-025-00444-8

Repository URI

https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/14506