A new report from the Institute of Development Studies, UK, calls on world leaders to look beyond the conventional staples of the public health toolkit as they draw up a new WHO global treaty on pandemics.
On Wednesday 16 November 2022 between 12:00-15:00 GMT, The Wellcome Trust collaborative Pandemics Preparedness Project is hosting Shifting Power in Pandemics, a public webinar on connecting and supporting preparedness ‘from below’. Shifting Power in Pandemics, will explore issues surrounding connecting and supporting preparedness from below and feature expert speakers from Africa, the Americas and Europe, including investigators from SSHAP.
In the last twenty years, influenza has been considered by global health experts as a model for the emergence of new pathogens from animal reservoirs.
In the logic of zoonoses, human disease is the tip of the iceberg constituted by a wide circulation of viruses – often asymptomatic – in animals; it is often described as an “evolutionary dead-end”.
“Untimely ends” can then be best approached as transformative topoi between the symbolic order of really existing epidemics and the pandemic imaginary, as a vision of the (biological and ontological) end of humanity.
Rather than just bridging experience and anticipation, they create the conditions of possibility of transference between the thinkable and the unthinkable.
In late August 2011, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Hurricane Irene tore northwards up the Atlantic, its projected path fixed over the U.S. East Coast. So great was the force of the tropical storm’s anticipation that flood-prone and low-lying metropolitan areas from Virginia Beach to Providence were preemptively evacuated.
New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, in what would later be dismissed by some as an overblown display of preparedness, closed the New York City transit system, shut off water and electricity in lower Manhattan, and preemptively deployed the National Guard.
While we might enjoy the entertainment, in real life people prefer their experts to be optimists – which, fortunately, characterises most of us working in the world of global health, even when working in very adverse and trying circumstances.
We rally around policy changes that presuppose that humans can, as a species, manage our relationship to emerging and deadly new pathogens. We don’t like the language of doom and gloom.