The Indian public health response to COVID-19 has been sidelining expert advice and scientific debate in favor of a political agenda, writes Dr. Rama Baru, professor at the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Against the trend of vaccine nationalism, India is emerging as one of the major global suppliers of COVID-19 vaccines, writes Dr Biswajit Dhar, professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
The historical legacy of Nagayo Sensai and the Japanese hygienic practice and mentality of “eisei” illustrates the importance of non-pharmaceutical interventions and the necessity of establishing a strong local public health infrastructure for managing COVID-19, writes Eimi Watanabe, former Assistant Secretary General and Director of the UNDP’s Bureau for Development Policy.
COVID-19 is emblematic of how the global public health industry is complicit in the reproduction of “the African tragedy,” writes Takiyah Harper-Shipman, an assistant professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College and public health major Kim Bako.
An unwillingness to learn from East Asian countries has been a hallmark of the Western response to the COVID-19 pandemic, writes Dr. Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a senior advisor at the Khazanah Research Institute and the first United Nations Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development.
The varied response to the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the crisis of expertise and power dynamics within different approaches to public health, writes Gil Eyal, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and author of The Crisis of Expertise (Polity, 2019).
Golrokh Nafisi, a contemporary Iranian artist, brings a new perspective on the impact of COVID-19 on collective mourning, grief, and political identity in Iran.
The overwhelming prioritization of vaccines takes attention and resources away from the complex political, social and infrastructural investments that underlie a resilient public health response, writes Manjari Mahajan, Associate Professor of International Affairs at The New School.
The coronavirus shutdown in Argentina has revealed systemic institutional violence and discrimination against indigenous and lower-class communities, write Silvia Hirsch and Andrea Mastrangelo, social scientists with the University of San Martín, Argentina.
