The Industrial Front and the Pandemic Crisis in Brazil: The Missing Agenda

The article seeks to identify the government initiatives to mobilise the Brazilian industry during the pandemic crisis. The motivation for the work stems from evidence showing the omissions at the federal level, with relevant implications for the death figures in Brazil. Public policies agenda and a conceptual review was carried out on industrial reconversion in severe emergency conditions, including international experiences in the current scenario. A documental survey was conducted with the federal government and selected state governments. The survey was carried out on the official portals of governments, related agencies and business entities representing the industrial sector. Lack of industry-coordinated mobilisation is given by the combination of intrinsic and extrinsic factors concerning the pandemic crisis, industrial reconversion is another relevant absence at the public agenda. Weak answers of Brazilian government regarding the industrial mobilisation for fighting the pandemic crisis, leading to further hypotheses on the structured agenda of possible effects. The study shows weakness of federal measures coming from the Brazilian government also in the economic front, adding the industrial reconversion absence in the policies agenda as another remarkable feature on the health impacts of COVID-19 pandemics.

Introduction: medicine's shadowside: revisiting clinical iatrogenesis.

Drawing on the work of Ivan Illich, our special issue reanimates iatrogenesis as a vital concept for the social sciences of medicine. It calls for medicine to expand its engagement of the injustices that unfold from clinical processes, practices, and protocols into patient lifeworlds and subjectivities beyond the clinic. The capacious view of iatrogenesis revealed by this special issue collection affords fuller and more heterogeneous insights on iatrogenesis that does not limit it to medical explanations alone, nor locate harm in singular points in time. These papers attend to iatrogenesis' immediate and lingering presences in socialities and structures within and beyond medicine, and the ways it reflects or reproduces the racism, sexism, and ableism built into medical logics.

COVID-19 Has Revealed America's Broken Health Care System: What Can We Learn?

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed long-standing system problems of US health care ranging from access barriers, uncontrolled prices and costs, unacceptable quality, widespread disparities and inequities, and marginalization of public health. All of these have been well documented by international comparisons. Our largely privatized market-based system and medical-industrial complex have been ill equipped to respond effectively to the pandemic. The accompanying economic downturn exacerbates these problems that further reveal the failures of our largely for-profit private health insurance industry, dependent as it is on continued government subsidies while it profiteers on the backs of vulnerable Americans. This article brings historical perspective to these problems, and provides markers of the extent of our unpreparedness and ineffective response to the pandemic. Coherent national health and public health policies are urgently needed based on evidence-based science, not political pressures. Financing reform is necessary, such as through single-payer Medicare for All. Eight takeaway lessons are summarized that can help to inform now best to rebuild US health care and public health, an urgent task for the incoming Biden administration.