Tracing a New Regime of Global Health amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic

Alka Menon, Yale University

Contemporary global health is indelibly shaped by imperial power. The COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to re-assess how these legacies shape present global health infrastructures as well as ideas about what global health is and should be. In his 2017 book, Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency, Andrew Lakoff identifies two complementary regimes of global health: global health security and humanitarian biomedicine. The regime of global health security is oriented toward anticipating the future, preparing for novel infectious diseases, and nipping them in the bud. The regime of humanitarian biomedicine asserts that everyone has a right to health and combats disease in low income settings. Both regimes presume a highly interconnected world, and yet both revolve around “core” countries that provide the money for a global-scale public health infrastructure and apparatus. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly shaken up the global health landscape, raising the question of whether these regimes give us the tools to understand and explain what is happening with the unfolding health system. How does the COVID-19 pandemic challenge our existing conceptualizations of global health? The paper proposes several re-orientations toward an alternative emergent regime of health. First, it suggests re-centering attention on former colonies in regions like Latin America or Southeast Asia instead of on imperial centers in Europe and North America. Second, an alternative regime might emphasize systemic breakdown and transforming ecologies as occurring in tandem with disease emergencies. Third, it would reflect an emergent ethical stance of experimentation. Fourth, it would recognize the centrality of private companies alongside national and regional health agencies and foundations. Fifth, it would be characterized by low-tech, community-oriented interventions. Finally, an alternative regime of global health would be bounded and shaped by indicators, combining the biopolitics of vital statistics with economics and extensively modeling future outcomes.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 221. Public Health and Race