or future generations, the COVID-19 pandemic—officially declared over by U.S. President Joe Biden—will probably read like a chronicle of a disaster foretold. For some the threat of a pandemic had long been visible, but the world ignored it for reasons ranging from naive optimism to the inability to envision epidemiological disasters on such a grand scale. The developed world’s reliance on progress coupled with the belief that pandemics belong to a distant past blinded policy makers to the rapidly increasing threat in early 2020. Global failures made one thing abundantly clear: global health challenges require a united front. While the EU and the United Nations envision this front as speeding up vaccination and building vaccine confidence, frontline health diplomacy must be central to efforts to prevent the next disaster. This requires melding medical science and diplomacy in a way that focuses not only on vaccination and mitigation efforts, but on their associated political and ethical complexities. Frontline health diplomacy needs philosophy and ethics to successfully navigate future global challenges.
Global health has always been an inherently political and diplomatic issue. Since the first International Sanitary Conference (1851) in Paris—a city that had already been ravaged by cholera—scientists, physicians, and diplomats have sat at the same table to stave off common enemies. As viruses crossed national borders like invading armies, diplomats found themselves at the center of tumultuous medical disputes. From bilateral agreements to global intergovernmental organizations—such as the League of Nations and the World Health Organization—nations have sought to mobilize cross-border medical and scientific collaboration to combat deadly diseases. Meanwhile, scientists and physicians have opened up paths that would be the envy of most diplomats.
During the recent pandemic, science has again come to the rescue. The swift emergence of several vaccines created the expectation that it was merely a matter of time before deep political and economic inequalities around the world could be resolved. What science brought above all else was the promise of a return to normality. Yet, despite this hope, we have been reminded that even if something desirable, it does not automatically guarantee global consensus. Not surprisingly, the Hippocratic oath to help the sick is harder to adhere to as medical innovations are not free. In this case health diplomacy can play a crucial role in ensuring cooperation between governments, technical agencies, medical institutions, and the private sector for the benefit of society. Yet in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, its role was reduced to vaccine diplomacy.
The vaccines were not merely a life-saving scientific discovery, but opened a veritable Pandora’s box of complications. While several countries promoted international cooperation and open science, there was fierce international competition between key players on how to control scientific innovation and reap diplomatic benefits. As a result, Western promises to incorporate perspectives from the global south and support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal on global health by “leaving no one behind,” lost traction.
Instead, powerful states pretended that the virus respected borders and tried to protect their own people by imposing vaccine export restrictions and heavily regulating the export of related materials. Within the complex state-industry-market nexus, vaccines became a diplomatic device that affected a country’s global prestige—as well as the profits of their pharmaceutical companies. It also reignited old and seemingly unrelated rivalries—such as those between Russian and the United States. “Sputnik V” and “Operation Warp Speed,” the names for the Russian vaccine and the U.S. research efforts, respectively, seem like throwbacks to the Cold War’s space race and Reagan administration’s Star Wars Program. It became clear that for many countries, the race to produce a vaccine mutated into patriotic grandstanding. In addition, this “vaccine nationalism” left humanity wondering if global health was actually the priority.
Now that the dust has settled, it is time to turn a critical eye on the kind of health diplomacy we need for the future. Frontline health diplomacy could be used to help redefine how we render viruses visible, define vaccines as safe, and declare pandemics as over. Just as we socially decide how to end experiments, we have politically decided how to end pandemics. Health diplomacy could represent a major tool for learning from this disaster and infusing meaning into the otherwise senseless loss of life. Science is not the sole superhero in global health—we must bring philosophy and ethics to the table if we are to address the next pandemic.
What philosophy and ethics bring to the equation is a fine-grained approach to issues. While health directly implicates the body, the body is a vessel of radically different interpersonal and intercultural values and perspectives that need to be understood and incorporated into any effective responses. For its part, diplomacy—like any negotiation process—cannot simply be about persuading others to accept one’s values, but to reach a compromise. When it comes to something as fundamental as health, the temptation to assume a uniformity of objectives is perhaps at its greatest. Philosophy helps us address this challenge by drawing attention to how different values directly affect different people. Incorporating these perspectives can produce solutions to problems such as the unprecedented resistance to science and vaccination that we saw during the pandemic months.
Philosophy has a venerable history of providing crucial perspectives on how science operates and conceptualizes reality. In medicine, ethics have brought about landmark conceptual shifts in areas such consent and abortion. It is time to value the role of the humanities in scientific research and realize that diplomacy and science went hand-in-hand long before COVID-19. Only by critically analyzing both the science and the politics of pandemics can policies be designed to address the global health crises of today and the future.
Note: This publication is part of the HRP-IAEA project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No770548).
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Frontline Health Diplomacy Must Incorporate Philosophy and Ethics
Photo by shahin khalaji via Unsplash.
October 15, 2022
Frontline health diplomacy must be central to efforts to prevent the next pandemic. This requires focusing not only on medical science, but philosophy and ethics to successfully navigate future global challenges, writes Maria Rentetzi and Spyros Petrounakos.
F
or future generations, the COVID-19 pandemic—officially declared over by U.S. President Joe Biden—will probably read like a chronicle of a disaster foretold. For some the threat of a pandemic had long been visible, but the world ignored it for reasons ranging from naive optimism to the inability to envision epidemiological disasters on such a grand scale. The developed world’s reliance on progress coupled with the belief that pandemics belong to a distant past blinded policy makers to the rapidly increasing threat in early 2020. Global failures made one thing abundantly clear: global health challenges require a united front. While the EU and the United Nations envision this front as speeding up vaccination and building vaccine confidence, frontline health diplomacy must be central to efforts to prevent the next disaster. This requires melding medical science and diplomacy in a way that focuses not only on vaccination and mitigation efforts, but on their associated political and ethical complexities. Frontline health diplomacy needs philosophy and ethics to successfully navigate future global challenges.
Global health has always been an inherently political and diplomatic issue. Since the first International Sanitary Conference (1851) in Paris—a city that had already been ravaged by cholera—scientists, physicians, and diplomats have sat at the same table to stave off common enemies. As viruses crossed national borders like invading armies, diplomats found themselves at the center of tumultuous medical disputes. From bilateral agreements to global intergovernmental organizations—such as the League of Nations and the World Health Organization—nations have sought to mobilize cross-border medical and scientific collaboration to combat deadly diseases. Meanwhile, scientists and physicians have opened up paths that would be the envy of most diplomats.
During the recent pandemic, science has again come to the rescue. The swift emergence of several vaccines created the expectation that it was merely a matter of time before deep political and economic inequalities around the world could be resolved. What science brought above all else was the promise of a return to normality. Yet, despite this hope, we have been reminded that even if something desirable, it does not automatically guarantee global consensus. Not surprisingly, the Hippocratic oath to help the sick is harder to adhere to as medical innovations are not free. In this case health diplomacy can play a crucial role in ensuring cooperation between governments, technical agencies, medical institutions, and the private sector for the benefit of society. Yet in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, its role was reduced to vaccine diplomacy.
The vaccines were not merely a life-saving scientific discovery, but opened a veritable Pandora’s box of complications. While several countries promoted international cooperation and open science, there was fierce international competition between key players on how to control scientific innovation and reap diplomatic benefits. As a result, Western promises to incorporate perspectives from the global south and support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal on global health by “leaving no one behind,” lost traction.
Instead, powerful states pretended that the virus respected borders and tried to protect their own people by imposing vaccine export restrictions and heavily regulating the export of related materials. Within the complex state-industry-market nexus, vaccines became a diplomatic device that affected a country’s global prestige—as well as the profits of their pharmaceutical companies. It also reignited old and seemingly unrelated rivalries—such as those between Russian and the United States. “Sputnik V” and “Operation Warp Speed,” the names for the Russian vaccine and the U.S. research efforts, respectively, seem like throwbacks to the Cold War’s space race and Reagan administration’s Star Wars Program. It became clear that for many countries, the race to produce a vaccine mutated into patriotic grandstanding. In addition, this “vaccine nationalism” left humanity wondering if global health was actually the priority.
Now that the dust has settled, it is time to turn a critical eye on the kind of health diplomacy we need for the future. Frontline health diplomacy could be used to help redefine how we render viruses visible, define vaccines as safe, and declare pandemics as over. Just as we socially decide how to end experiments, we have politically decided how to end pandemics. Health diplomacy could represent a major tool for learning from this disaster and infusing meaning into the otherwise senseless loss of life. Science is not the sole superhero in global health—we must bring philosophy and ethics to the table if we are to address the next pandemic.
What philosophy and ethics bring to the equation is a fine-grained approach to issues. While health directly implicates the body, the body is a vessel of radically different interpersonal and intercultural values and perspectives that need to be understood and incorporated into any effective responses. For its part, diplomacy—like any negotiation process—cannot simply be about persuading others to accept one’s values, but to reach a compromise. When it comes to something as fundamental as health, the temptation to assume a uniformity of objectives is perhaps at its greatest. Philosophy helps us address this challenge by drawing attention to how different values directly affect different people. Incorporating these perspectives can produce solutions to problems such as the unprecedented resistance to science and vaccination that we saw during the pandemic months.
Philosophy has a venerable history of providing crucial perspectives on how science operates and conceptualizes reality. In medicine, ethics have brought about landmark conceptual shifts in areas such consent and abortion. It is time to value the role of the humanities in scientific research and realize that diplomacy and science went hand-in-hand long before COVID-19. Only by critically analyzing both the science and the politics of pandemics can policies be designed to address the global health crises of today and the future.
Note: This publication is part of the HRP-IAEA project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No770548).
