Centring a critical medical anthropology of COVID-19 in global health discourse

Identifier:  imarina:9219133

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/imarina9219133

Authors:  Gamlin, Jennie; Segata, Jean; Berrio, Lina; Gibbon, Sahra; Ortega, Francisco

Abstract:
The disciplines of biomedicine and global health have been at the epicentre of understanding and finding solutions to the current COVID-19 pandemic. We are thankful for the record-breaking speed of vaccine development, the meticulousness with which the virus is being tracked in order to identify and respond to new variants, developments in hospital care practices and treatments that have contributed to bringing down the case fatality rate and to the breadth of research analysing sex and gender differentials, reasons for the over-representation of black and ethnic minority groups and wider social determinants of COVID-19 mortality. However, global health from its transnational positionality almost always reproduces, in local situations, a ‘global’ coronavirus-centred framework that homogenises the pandemic from a predominantly biomedical perspective, of which the social sciences are frequently outside looking in.