The futility of the pandemic treaty: caught between globalism and statism

Wenham, Clare ORCID: 0000-0001-5378-3203, Eccleston-Turner, Mark and Voss, Maike (2022) The futility of the pandemic treaty: caught between globalism and statism. International Affairs, 98 (3). 837 – 852. ISSN 0020-5850

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Abstract

In November 2021, the World Health Assembly (WHA) is hosting a special session to discuss the proposed plans for a pandemic treaty. Despite the fact that there are scant details concerning the treaty, the proposal has gained considerable support in both the academic community, and at the international level. While we agree that in the wake of the numerous governance failures during COVID-19, we need to develop appropriate global solutions to be able to prevent, detect, respond to, and recover from future global health crises—and that such mechanisms should be rooted in global equity—we disagree, however, that this pandemic treaty, currently, is the most appropriate way in which to achieve this. Indeed, notions of global community, solidarity, fairness are far removed from the reality that we have seen unfolding in the actions of states responding to the pandemic. This is the crux of the tension with the proposed treaty: the balance between the ideal cosmopolitan worldview held by those in power in global health, and the practice of national security decision-making witnessed in the last 18 months. Indeed, we do not believe that a pandemic treaty will deliver what is being extolled by its proponents, and it will not solve the multiple problems of global cooperation in global health that supporters believe it will.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://academic.oup.com/ia
Additional Information:	© 2022 The Authors
Divisions:	Health Policy
Subjects:	J Political Science > JZ International relations R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology
Date Deposited:	18 Jan 2022 10:36
Last Modified:	12 Dec 2024 02:48
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/113455

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