New Pandemics, Old Politics: Two Hundred Years of War on Disease and Its Alternatives, Alex de Waal, ( Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2021 ), 284 pp., cloth $64.95, paperback $22.95, eBook $14.00

ABSTRACT

While the chapter emphasizes the role of socioeconomic, political, and environmental factors in the emergence of HIV/AIDS in Africa, it loses sight of another relevant point that would have connected to a crucial aspect of the book's overall argument;namely, that responses to health crises are significantly shaped by the prevailing political and socioeconomic context. The 1990s are symbolic of the emergence of strong social movements at the national, regional, and global levels, embedded in the redemocratization processes that occurred in many countries in the Global South after the Cold War and facilitated by the emergence of the Internet. [...]this public narrative shaped the real-world health responses to major outbreaks that occurred over the last twenty years, such as SARS in 2002–2003, the 2009 swine flu pandemic, and the 2014–2016 outbreak of Ebola in Western Africa. [...]it is not surprising that the global response to COVID-19 has been dominated by this old script.