The Duck of Minerva

I’m not going to lie. When I heard that the Trump Administration was going to release its budget blueprint, I didn’t have high hopes for global health. The new administration’s commitment to global health has been ambiguous at best, and early word was that medical and scientific research was in for some massive cuts. So what does the budget blueprint tell us about the future the US’ commitment to global health? It’s not all bad. In fact, for a budget that goes so far as to zero out funding for Meals on Wheels, global health comes out relatively well in some very specific ways, but the cuts...

There’s a lot of turmoil in global health governance these days, and it looks like it’s only getting more chaotic. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria is hitting the reset button in its quest to identify a new leader “due to issues in the recruitment process”—precisely at a moment when there are real fears about the future of funding for global health initiatives. What’s happening within the Global Fund may at first glance speak to dysfunction within that specific organization, but it’s better to think of the problems as emblematic of larger questions about legitimacy...

In the words of Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler from Donald Trump’s favorite television show, “Really!?!” Shortly after noon Eastern time in Washington, Donald Trump gave his inaugural address. In it, he proclaimed his desire “to free the Earth from the miseries of disease.” That’s not a bad sentiment. Health is important, the US has played a major role in developing and funding the global health system that currently exists, and there are a host of health challenges that continue to bedevil the world. Trump has made ambiguous statements about his global health commitments in the past, so this...

An event happens. Four different people tell four different versions of what happened. How do we figure out how to move forward? This is a very rough plot summary of Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 masterpiece Rashomon, but it’s also a pretty accurate description of what is happening to the World Health Organization these days. There’s probably a generation of folks who know Kurosawa because he was name-checked in Rent, but the Japanese director also gives us a window for thinking about international politics. The World Health Organization (WHO) has come under an immense amount of criticism over the...

Writing about poo Raises awareness, saves lives Oddest line on CV I am definitely not a poet. Fortunately, the organizers of Poo Haiku had nearly 150 other entries from which to select 12 winners to have their haikus memorialized on the 2017 Poo Haiku calendar. This may seem like fun and games (and, let’s face it, trying to write a haiku about going #2 is pretty fun), but there’s a more serious purpose behind it. The Poo Haiku contest is sponsored by Defeat DD, an organization sponsored by PATH, a Seattle-based non-profit organization focused on global health. Michael Stevenson’s recent...

Two years ago, more people probably knew that Stephen Breyer is on the Supreme Court (hint: it’s a really low number) than had even heard of the Zika virus. I certainly hadn’t, and I make my living studying global health politics. The entirety of published research on Zika could fit in a shoebox. Since the first reports of the virus appeared in Brazil, though, Zika has grabbed international attention, leading to travel warnings and even causing some athletes to pull out of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. Zika’s emergence changed the dialogue on global health and forced states and...