We stand at an epic moment in history, akin to the transformations brought about by plague, slavery, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, war, decolonization, revolution, emancipation, human and civil rights, feminism, and climate change. The current pandemic brings into sharp relief the fault lines of inequality that divide the world both between and within sovereign states, compelling near universal fear and suffering. COVID-19 is a limit case, an emergency of cosmic proportions that can alert us to the limitations and failings of the current world, specifically in the elemental field of health.
How should we reconstruct our societies, environments, cultures, and economies in the anticipated wake of COVID-19 - a world 'after' it?
To find an answer, we need to examine the dominant discourse of public policy, healthcare in particular. We need a COVID Charter.
This book, written by eminent scholar Toby Miller, focuses on the case studies of the US, Britain, Mexico, and Colombia, on the corporate, scientific, and governmental decision making and the disadvantaged and vulnerable communities in each place, to understand how each country is grappling with the pandemic, but in the background the book also pays heed to what has happened in Asia, Africa, and other parts of Europe, as well as the balance of geopolitical power. Miller intends to call for an end to neoliberalism, specifically market-based health care and a reallocation of resources away from pharmaceutical corporations and insurance companies and toward health as a universal public good. The crisis presented by Covid-19 is taken as a further indictment of neoliberalism as a politically and socially bankrupt form of reasoning. The chapters build up to the COVID Charter and how it can be argued for and implemented. The charter draws on the histories of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the UN Charter, the African Charter of Human and Peoples' Rights, the ASEAN Charter, and the American Convention on Human Rights and the Earth Charter to emphasize the expansion and deepening of human rights as part of broader action against neoliberalism.
