Pandemics Politics

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course is taught at the intersection of public health, political science, public policy, and law. The pandemics of HIV/AIDS, COVID-19, MPox, Ebola and beyond have occurred alongside the rapid advance of science and medicine in recent years. In a context of climate crisis, globalization, and rising global inequality, pandemics are occurring with increasing frequency. International cooperation has often broken down and domestic politics have often driven laws and policy in health crises. This has led to complex negotiations about how best to tackle pandemics that touch on some of the hardest social and political issues in our world. A wide variety of lessons have been learned in the fight against AIDS that can be applied to broader pandemics—lessons about the role of law and politics in tackling disease, the effectiveness of health aid, overcoming barriers to affordable medicines, human resources for health, and the role of health systems in tackling or cementing inequality. Despite notable success in the fight against HIV the pandemic continues and, while affected communities vary by region, young women in Africa, LGBT people, sex workers, people who use drugs and prisoners face some of the highest HIV risks. Across all pandemics economic barriers, criminalization, discrimination, deficient governance, high priced medicines, inadequate health systems, and inappropriate legislation continue to militate against global ability to stop pandemics. The course will use comparative politics cases like the United States, South Africa, and Brazil and international relations examples like vaccine nationalism and negotiations over a pandemic treaty to understand how political ideas and actors shape pandemic response. We will explore pandemics from different perspectives (touching on epidemiology, public health, culture, finance, human rights, and public policy) in both a national and international context. It will address issues such as: the drivers of viral infections and shifting epidemiology over the course of a pandemic; public health laws and policies; differential responses to pandemics tied to differences in political institutions; racial and gender dimensions of a pandemic; social and political factors to be addressed for a successful response; the role of civil society and social movements; the global resource needs and resource allocation decisions within countries; and equity and universal access to prevention and treatment.