Note: This post began life as an op-ed; I have amended it slightly from the version shared on Facebook to add more social scientific perspective. The United States set new single-day record for new COVID cases on June 24th through 26th, surpassing what had been hoped...
This is a guest post from Annick T.R. Wibben is Anna Lindh Professor of Gender, Peace & Security at the Swedish Defence University. Her research straddles critical security and military studies,...
This is a guest post from Jiun Bang, PhD (University of Southern California, political science and international relations), currently a visiting scholar at the Korean Studies Institute at USC. In...
Last month, Sofia Fenner wrote a terrific post for us on comparative responses to COVID19, focusing on regime type, state capacity, leadership, and civil society response.Mark Leon Goldberg...
December 1 is World AIDS day. Throughout the 2000s, AIDS received unprecedented attention and resources, particularly to support ten of millions of people's access to life-extending anti-retroviral therapy. Attention and resources peaked in recent years, and while the problem in some respects has gotten better, it hasn't gone away. More than 35 million people have died from AIDS already. And yet, there are still more than 35 million people living with the virus that causes AIDS, only half of whom have access to ARVs. While new infections and deaths have come down from their peaks, there...
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...
Well, that was unexpected. But it’s happened. The question now is, how will the election of Donald Trump change international relations? That question itself is overwhelming on multiple levels. There are Trump’s personal international business ties, unparalleled in modern American political history. There’s his wariness of multilateralism and diplomacy. There’s his stated intention to go after China. There’s Trump’s lack of experience in international relations, which suggests that his advisers are likely to be even more important (and the names of people being bandied about for top...
I’ve been marking essays for the past week (two big advantages of Australian academia: November is a spring month, and second semester ends before Halloween), and a lot of my students were writing about the right to health and what it would take to realize it in a meaningful sense. That, naturally, led me to thinking about cholera. Few diseases can kill as rapidly as cholera. That alone should make it a key issue for global health. What makes cholera particularly important and interesting, though, is how much it says about our larger global health system and the interconnectedness between...
With any luck, the myth of Patient Zero being responsible for HIV/AIDS in the US will finally be completely put to rest. Gaétan Dugas may not be a household name for most, but he’s the man who has largely been blamed for HIV/AIDS in the United States. Dugas was a gay French-Canadian airline steward who worked for Air Canada in the 1970s and 1980s. Because his work involved a significant amount of travel and because of the number of his sexual contacts, a 1984 study linked him to some other early cases (though it could not necessarily prove a direct line of infection). Dugas came to public...
When I walk down the street, I don’t see signs saying “Tedros for WHO” or “Vote Szócska.” The television and radio airwaves don’t have endless campaign commercials ending with the tagline, “I’m Flavia Bustreo, and I approve this message.” Sania Nishtar does not hold large public rallies in sports stadiums to bolster her candidacy. Neither David Nabarro nor Philippe Douste-Blazy do phonebanking. These facts don’t distract from the fact that there is a vigorous and hotly-contested electoral race for the Director-General of the World Health Organization. Think of the current period as the...
It should come as no surprise to anyone that a political scientist like me gets really excited about elections and campaigns, and we’re currently in the thick of a doozy of a campaign season. Candidates have splashy websites and brochures, and they regularly meet with voters to pitch their candidacies. Whoever wins will take over an organization whose standing in the world is up in the air—and the winner will have a big job restoring the organization’s place in the larger global landscape. Of course, I’m talking about the campaign for the next Director-General of the World Health...
Why don’t government officials respond to global health emergencies the same way that they respond to national security crises? This is the question Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) raised last week. She was speaking at the public launch of a new report by the Brenthurst Foundation on international society’s failure to respond to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in a timely manner—but much of the conversation focused on the current response to Zika. If military officials said they needed $1.9 billion to prevent a global crisis, she argued, Congress would not hesitate to approve the money....