ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter recapitulates the diverse ways in which deleterious forms of pandemic politics contributed to Mexico’s painful experience with COVID-19. It underscores that Mexicans endured unnecessary human suffering because both global governance and governmental authorities on many accounts got the politics of the pandemic response wrong. It stresses that it was not necessarily global and domestic policies in themselves that were at fault, but how they were politicised, and that counterfactually, many Mexican lives could have been saved if the Mexican government and global governance actors had gotten the politics right. The analysis then reflects on what is entailed in order to get the politics of pandemic responses right, identifying three core challenges. The first question is how to shield or insulate key global governance and government actors and institutions from populist politics. A second challenge relates to global political economy: how to promote more equitable global pandemic governance. Lastly, there is the question of how to promote greater governmental accountability and transparency for Mexican public authorities, both during pandemic emergencies and in their aftermath.
