Publications

On 7 November 2020, moments before Kamala Harris and Joe Biden began their victory speeches, giant screens flanking the stage proclaimed, “The people have chosen science.” Yet, nearly 74 million Americans, almost half the voters, had cast their ballots for Donald Trump, thereby presumably not choosing science. Prominent scientists asserted that “science was on the ballot” and lamented that “a significant portion of America doesn’t want science” (1) Read more

This short report draws on two studies—the CompCoRe Interim Report and a report by our African affiliate—that together include 23 countries on six continents. It provides preliminary insights into why COVID-19 has produced different outcomes in different places, how policymakers can better manage national responses in the months ahead, and what we must do to strengthen national and global systems for future health emergencies. Read more

This paper discusses the diverse grounds on which litigation during the Covid-19 pandemic tested the nature and limits of power in a public health system that has long functioned like a state within a state. The pandemic revealed a tension between human beings as biomedical subjects, more acted upon than acting, and as social and political subjects, more acting than acted upon. In the regime of what this paper calls public health sovereignty, people are required to observe potentially severe restraints on liberty in the name of the common good and are governed by the disciplinary mechanisms of biopower described by Michel Foucault. Read more

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic has forced science advisory institutions and processes into an unusually prominent role, and placed their decisions under intense public, political and media scrutiny. In the UK, much of the focus has been on whether the government was too late in implementing its lockdown policy, resulting in thousands of unnecessary deaths. Some experts have argued that this was the result of poor data being fed into epidemiological models in the early days of the pandemic, resulting in inaccurate estimates of the virus’s doubling rate. Read more

The manuscript discusses interfaces between academic and practical fields of Global Health and Planetary Health, shedding light on some critical perspectives of cumulative and synergistic causes of global crises, and effects on health and food security, on human rights, on migration, and on environment. Concepts of Global Health and Planetary Health and the path for the Sustainable Development Goals -SDG in the context of the Syndemy of Global Crisis, in particular the COVID-19 pandemic, are presented. Read more

This chapter is part of a cooperation involving the members of the Global Technology Assessment Network (https://globalta.technology-assessment.info/), a network of institutions working together to reflect on global forms of governing technologies. The chapter proposes principles for global governance of emerging bio risks and ways to increase resilience to withstand future risks.

Several suggestions have been made as to why Sweden’s approach to managing the COVID-19 pandemic came to rely on a strategy based on voluntary measures. Two of the most prominent explanations for why the country chose a different strategy than many other countries have focused on micro- and macro-level factors, explaining the strategy either in terms of the psychologies of prominent actors or by pointing to particularities in Swedish constitutional law. Read more

COVID-19 has posed unprecedented challenges to governments and civil society worldwide. Before effective treatments and vaccines become available, nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), including digital contact tracing technologies, are critical for delaying or controlling the spread of COVID-19. This paper investigates the practices, discussions, and legal and ethical issues of the contact tracing measures imposed in Taiwan during the COVID-19 pandemic. Read more

The COVID-19 pandemic has confounded the world’s expectations at every turn. It began in surprise, continued with chaos, and devolved into conspiracy theories. From a policy standpoint, it gave the lie to our prepandemic imaginations of order and control. Public health experts, after all, had warned of an outbreak for decades. Read more