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The Global Politics of Health Security before, during, and after COVID-19

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2021

Andreas Papamichail
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Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has been shaped by preexisting political, social, and economic relations and governance structures, and will remold these structures going forward. This review essay considers three books on global health politics written by Simon Rushton, Clare Wenham, and Jeremy Youde. Here, I explore what these books collectively and individually can tell us about these preexisting dynamics, the events of the first eighteen months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and possible future directions in the politics of global health. I argue that they provide a firm basis for understanding the inequitable burdens of the pandemic, while juxtaposing these inequities against the narratives of shared vulnerability that sit at the heart of the global health security regime. They also help us make sense of the surveillance, detection, containment, and response mechanisms we have seen during the pandemic; the failures to address the systemic dynamics that drive disease outbreaks; and the national and international politics that have shaped the pandemic response. However, COVID-19 has also vividly and brutally demonstrated how global health hierarchies, racism, border politics, and neoliberal forms of knowledge production have led to a stratified burden of the pandemic. These areas are less apparent in the three books, but ought to be situated front and center in future critical scholarship on global health security.

Keywords

COVID-19global health securitypandemic responsehealth inequitySimon RushtonClare WenhamJeremy Youde
Type
Review Essay
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , Fall 2021 , pp. 467 - 481
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

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References

NOTES

1 Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the virus that causes coronavirus disease (commonly referred to as COVID-19).

2 Joe Biden, “Statement by President Joe Biden on the Investigation into the Origins of COVID-19,” White House, May 26, 2021, www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/05/26/statement-by-president-joe-biden-on-the-investigation-into-the-origins-of-covid-19/.

3 See, for example, the work of the Gender & COVID-19 working group: www.genderandcovid-19.org/about/.

4 Cousins, Thomas, Pentecost, Michelle, Alvergne, Alexandra, Chandler, Clare, Chigudu, Simukai, Herrick, Clare, Kelly, Ann, et al. , “The Changing Climates of Global Health,” BMJ Global Health 6, no. 3 (2021), pp. 1–6CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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7 The Global Health Security Index is a global benchmarking exercise that ranks states on the basis of their national health security capabilities. The U.S. and U.K. ranked first and second in the 2019 rankings.

8 Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri, “COVID-19 and the Failure of the Neoliberal Regulatory State,” Review of International Political Economy (2021), pp. 1–25.

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11 Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness & Response, COVID-19: Make It the Last Pandemic (Geneva: Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness & Response Secretariat, May 2021), theindependentpanel.org/mainreport/.

12 Eric Reidy, “The COVID-19 Excuse? How Migration Policies Are Hardening around the Globe,” New Humanitarian, April 17, 2020, www.thenewhumanitarian.org/analysis/2020/04/17/coronavirus-global-migration-policies-exploited; and Joanna Kakissis and Abu Bakr Bashir, “Asylum-Seekers Make Harrowing Journeys in Pandemic, Only to Be Turned Back,” NPR, February 13, 2021, www.npr.org/2021/02/13/949182773/the-harrowing-journeys-to-safety-of-asylum-seekers-during-a-pandemic?t=1623168465398.

13 Andrew Connelly, “Britain Doesn't Have a Refugee Crisis, So It Created One,” Foreign Policy, February 22, 2021, foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/22/britain-refugee-crisis-europe-boris-johnson-priti-patel-asylum-seekers/.

14 Alison Howell, “The Global Politics of Medicine: Beyond Global Health, against Securitisation Theory,” Review of International Studies 40, no. 5 (December 25, 2014), pp. 961–87.

15 Adam Ferhani and Simon Rushton, “The International Health Regulations COVID-19, and Bordering Practices: Who Gets In, What Gets Out, and Who Gets Rescued?,” Contemporary Security Policy 41, no. 3 (2020), pp. 458–77.

16 Chigudu, Simukai, “An Ironic Guide to Colonialism in Global Health,” Lancet 397, no. 10288 (May 22, 2021), pp. 1874–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 1875.

17 Sell, Susan K. and Williams, Owain D., “Health under Capitalism: A Global Political Economy of Structural Pathogenesis,” in “Political Economies of Global Health,” special issue, Review of International Political Economy 27, no. 1 (January 2, 2020), pp. 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 6.

18 de Freitas Lima Ventura, Deisy, di Giulio, Gabriela Marques, and Rached, Danielle Hanna, “Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic: Sustainability Is an Indispensable Condition of Global Health Security,” Ambiente & Sociedade 23, no. 1 (2020), pp. 1–13Google Scholar.

19 Cousins et al., “The Changing Climates of Global Health,” pp. 1–6, at p. 2.