ABSTRACT
The syndemic which evolved from the Covid-19 pandemic is allowing us to learn about geopolitics and biopolitics in global emergencies, and about the current relationship between the Global North and the Global South, which is characterised by a hegemony of the richest nations controlling health policies. The privileged Global North, which for more than a century had believed that the danger their population faced from epidemics had passed, has seen this belief crumble, exposing the soft underbelly of today’s (neoliberal) globalisation. Other recent epidemics, despite their different scale, had already threatened our Global Health governance model, raising numerous dilemmas about epidemic control measures and their implementation. However, lessons learned from those were ignored when the world confronted Covid-19, with governments overlooking the heterogeneity among societies and imposing a top-down, “one-size-fits-all” approach. In this chapter, I am going to draw on my experience as a humanitarian health worker and discuss some control actions of both a local and a global nature, carried out in the context of Ebola, cholera, and other epidemics, to reflect upon measures deployed against the Covid-19 syndemic. I also raise questions about our notion of “Global Health” and the leading viewpoints in the current syndemic, dominated by a biomedical response wherein the social component has been overlooked, despite the role that medical anthropology could play in this and future epidemics.
