COVID-19 and the politics of prevention.
Eric Mykhalovskiy
Refereed Article, 2020
Mykhalovskiy, E., & French, M. (2020). COVID-19 and the politics of prevention. Sociology of Health and Illness, 42(8), e4–e15.
If the global HIV pandemic and more localised outbreaks of SARS, Ebola and the Zika virus, among others, did not convince us that infectious diseases have been far from conquered, then COVID‐19 must certainly have done so. In the past few months, questions about the global coronavirus pandemic – its cause, distribution, health and social impacts, and how best to limit its reach through public health measures – have re‐centred emerging infectious diseases in public and scholarly discourse.11 At the time of writing, recent news reports have begun to focus on global protests against racist police and state violence that have been prompted by the murder of George Floyd by White police officers in the United States. Such coverage has helped surface important messages about how inequality and systemic racism threaten the lives of Black People, Indigenous Peoples and People of Colour. And yet, COVID‐19 continues to act as a key framing device in such news stories in, for example, claims about how the protests represent a public health risk.