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‪ Often described as a ‘total social event’, the Covid-19 pandemic has aroused –and continues to– the scientific community’s interest, led by medicine and public health. Solicited by authorities in charge of crisis managing, researchers are playing their part in a game of influence that inevitably raises questions about the relationship between science and politics, decision-making and social acceptability. Caroline Ollivier-Yaniv, a researcher in information and communication sciences and an observer and analyst of public policy, has taken up this issue in this section of ‘Exchanges’. In it, she explores the topic at stake in institutional communication’s discourse and practices on public health. Among the observations, she notices that public authorities do not pay enough attention to research in the human and social sciences, even though such research is likely to reveal mechanisms at work in institutional games and the damaging role they play in the fight against the pandemic. To discuss her arguments, six researchers from different disciplinary traditions take the floor in three stimulating contributions: the political scientist Gwenola Le Naour; the sociologists Étienne Nouguez and Anne Moyal; the sociologist and lawyer Corinne Gendron, the political scientist and communicologist Stéphanie Yates, and the administrative science researcher Alice Friser. Each, in his or her own way, extends or even counters the thesis put forward by C. Ollivier-Yaniv. The discussants thus qualify or refute the doxic dimension of social acceptability, by theorising what can be considered as a concept and by drawing on their own research to support the argument empirically.‪