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Encapsulating security : pharmaceutical defenses against biological danger -- Discovering a virus's achilles heel : flu fighting at molecular scale -- The pill always wins: Gilead Sciences, Roche and the birth of Tamiflu -- What a difference a day makes : the margin call for regulatory agencies -- Virtual blockbuster : bird flu and the pandemic of preparedness planning -- In the eye of the storm : global access, generics and intellectual property -- 'Ode to Tamiflu' : side effects, teenage 'suicides' and corporate liabilities -- Data backlash : Roche and Cochrane square up over clinical trial data -- 'To boldly go ... ' : pharmaceutical enterprises and global health security -- Epilogue : pharmaceuticals, security and molecular life
The fascinating story of Tamiflu's development and stockpiling against global health threats.orld's most prominent medical countermeasure, Tamiflu. A pill can strengthen national security? The suggestion may seem odd, but many states around the world believe precisely that. Confronted with pandemics, bioterrorism, and emerging infectious diseases, governments are transforming their security policies to include the proactive development, acquisition, stockpiling, and mass distribution of new pharmaceutical defenses. What happens—politically, economically, and socially—when governments try to protect their populations with pharmaceuticals? How do competing interests among states, pharmaceutical companies, regulators, and scientists play out in the quest to develop new medical countermeasures? And do citizens around the world ultimately stand to gain or lose from this pharmaceuticalization of security policy? Stefan Elbe explores these complex questions in Pandemics, Pills, and Politics, the first in-depth study of the world’s most prominent medical countermeasure, Tamiflu. Taken by millions of people around the planet in the fight against pandemic flu, Tamiflu has provoked suspicions about undue commercial influence in government decision-making about stockpiles. It even found itself at the center of a prolonged political battle over who should have access to the data about the safety and effectiveness of medicines. Pandemics, Pills, and Politics shows that the story of Tamiflu harbors deeper lessons about the vexing political, economic, legal, social, and regulatory tensions that emerge as twenty-first-century security policy takes a pharmaceutical turn. At the heart of this issue, Elbe argues, lies something deeper: the rise of a new molecular vision of life that is reshaping the world we live in.
Separating FACT from FICTION in the COVID-19 Epidemic People are afraid. COVID-19 has upended our lives as it poses new medical dangers, economic suffering and grave uncertainty about the world around us. The collateral damage is enormous, but politics invade perception. There are so many unknowns. Does a treatment work? Is a vaccine coming? How likely are you to catch COVID and how can you best protect yourself and your family? What are the real risks and what is hysteria? Where are our fear leaders? What are their agendas? From Fox News Medical Contributor and the author of False Alarm (Wiley, 2008) comes COVID: The Politics of Fear and the Power of Science by Marc Siegel, M.D. This shocking exposé of the facts as the media covers the national pandemic news and spread of the invisible virus reinforces the notion that we must arm ourselves against fear tactics that limit our abilities to safely make decisions and protect our families in a world of uncertainty. Life for citizens of the developed world before the pandemic was safer, easier, and healthier than for any other people in history thanks to modern medicine, science, technology, and intelligence—but COVID-19 has stolen that security and our nation's peace of mind. Now there is a pandemic virus, as well as a crippling epidemic of fear sweeping America. Why? The answer, according to nationally renowned health commentator Dr. Marc Siegel, is that we already lived in an artificially created culture of fear that was just waiting to be unleashed. In COVID: The Politics of Fear and the Power of Science, Siegel identifies three major catalysts of the culture of fear: government, the media, and our own psyche. With fascinating, blow-by-blow analyses of the most sensational false alarms of the past few years, compounded now by the worst contagion of our lifetimes, he shows how fear mongers manipulate our most primitive instincts—often without our even realizing it. COVID shows us how to look behind the hype and hysteria, inoculate ourselves against these crippling fear tactics, and develop the emotional and intellectual skills needed to take back our lives, even as we battle the pandemic itself.
New Pandemics, Old Politics explores how the modern world adopted a martial script to deal with epidemic disease threats, and how this has failed – repeatedly. Europe first declared ‘war’ on cholera in the 19th century. It didn’t defeat the disease but it served purposes of state and empire. In 1918, influenza emerged from a real war and swept the world unchecked by either policy or medicine. Forty years ago, AIDS challenged the confidence of medical science. AIDS is still with us, but we have learned to live with it – chiefly because of community activism and emancipatory politics. Today, public health experts and political leaders who failed to listen to them agree on one thing: that we must ‘fight’ Covid-19. There’s a consensus that we should target individual pathogens and suppress them – rather than address the reasons why our societies are so vulnerable. Arguing that this consensus is mistaken, Alex de Waal makes the case for a new democratic public health for the Anthropocene.
Pandemics are potentially very destructive phenomena, and for that reason, they both fascinate and frighten us. And because they are shot through with uncertainty, they often become sites of contestation and conflict. This book presents research on the 2009 pandemic and other public health crises in an attempt to describe and analyze the distinctive challenges that such diseases pose today. Thanks to vaccines, more reliable provision of medical services, more effective means of communication, and a more educated public, some argue we will not see a new Black Plague – or even Spanish Flu – in our time. Today we face new challenges, however, which can both enable diseases to reach pandemic scales and affect our ability to enact an appropriate response. Those include fragmentation of media, tribalization of “knowledge regimes,” the increasingly troubled status of scientific and political expertise, growing cross-continental mobility, as well as the globalization and commercialization of pandemic response systems. These distinctive complexities make the need to stage public action in response to pandemics and other public health crises a crucial problem, on which thousands of human lives hinge. This volume consists of a handful of social science and humanities studies of precisely such complexities, and thus offers a much-needed supplement to existing research on pandemics and pandemic response.
This short book brings together novel cross-interdisciplinary investigation from both natural and social science, representing a true hybrid across disciplines examining the ‘politics’ and ‘science’ of COVID-19. Viruses, Vaccines, and Antivirals: Why Politics Matters considers the dynamics surrounding viruses, proposed vaccines, and antiviral therapies, contextualizing what governments have done during the COVID-19 crisis. The four basic phases of a pandemic are considered with a strong focus on COVID-19, namely the anticipating and early virus detection, containment strategies, policies to control and mitigate the spread of the virus and policies aimed at opening up society. Viruses, Vaccines, and Antivirals: Why Politics Matters examines policy developments throughout these phases in key nations worldwide and puts forward a blueprint for countries developing public policies to deal with a pandemic.
Professor Devi Sridhar has risen to prominence for her vital roles in communicating science to the public and speaking truth to power. In Preventable she highlights lessons learned from outbreaks past and present in a narrative that traces the COVID-19 pandemic - including her personal experience as a scientist - and sets out a vision for how we can better protect ourselves from the inevitable health crises to come. In gripping and heartfelt prose, Sridhar exposes the varied realities of those affected and puts you in the room with key decision makers at crucial moments. She vibrantly conveys the twists and turns of a plot that saw- deadlier variants emerge (contrary to the predictions of social media pundits who argued it would mutate to a milder form); countries with weak health systems like Senegal and Vietnam fare better than countries like the US and UK (which were consistently ranked as the most prepared); and the quickest development of game-changing vaccines in history (and their unfair distribution). Combining science, politics, ethics and economics, this definitive book dissects the global structures that determine our fate, and reveals the deep-seated economic and social inequalities at their heart - it will challenge, outrage and inspire.
This book reviews the political significance of COVID-19 in the context of earlier pandemic encounters and scares to understand the ways in which it challenges the existing individual health, domestic order, international health governance actors, and, more fundamentally, the circulation-based modus operandi of the present world order. It argues that contagious diseases should be regarded as complex open-ended phenomena with various features and are not reducible merely to biology and epidemiology. They are, as such, fundamentally politosomatic, namely that they disrupt, agitate, and trigger large-scale processes because individual somatic-level anxieties stem from individuals’ sensing immediate danger through the networks of their local and global connectedness. The author further argues that pandemics have somatic effects in political expressions that transform the epidemic into national security dramas which should not, for the sake of efficient health governance, be treated as aspects extraneous to the disease itself. The book highlights that when a serious infectious disease spreads, a 'threat' is very often externalized into a culturally meaningful 'foreign' entity. Pandemics tend to be territorialized, nationalized, ethnicized, and racialized. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of global health and governance, pandemic security, epidemics, history of medicine, geopolitics, international relations, and general readers interested in the COVID-19 pandemic.
A compelling exploration of how socio-political factors like inequality and poverty exacerbate pandemics. In a world where millions perish from preventable diseases amid unprecedented wealth and technological advancement, Pandemics, Poverty, and Politics illuminates a central paradox of our times. This compelling work by a seasoned physician and global health leader unravels the complex web of social, political, and economic factors driving pandemics and other health crises. Drawing from three decades of experience in the public health field, Tyler B. Evans, MD, MS, MPH, presents a unique and deeply personal narrative. The book begins with a foundational introduction to social medicine and health systems, as well as the social and political determinants of health. Case studies from every major pandemic since the mid-nineteenth century to current times—beginning with the third plague and ending with COVID-19—highlight the common social and political drivers of these outbreaks. Fractured health systems worsened by social disruption place inordinate stress on societies and disproportionately impact the most vulnerable. Case studies ranging from malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases to influenza, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and tuberculosis, reinforce how socio-political factors build upon each other; for example, high population stress following political repression and unrest in Apartheid South Africa contributed to a major outbreak of HIV in the 1990s. While scientific advancements have progressed, the failure to address underlying social inequities leaves us vulnerable to even more devastating health crises. This book is an essential read for public health professionals, policymakers, students, and anyone committed to understanding and mitigating the complex factors that underpin global health emergencies.
Providing an immediate, contemporary example of a region networking its response to disease outbreak events, this insightful book will appeal to global health governance scholars, students, and practitioners.