Technical assistance and socialist international health: Hungary, the WHO and the Korean War

Missing pieces: Integrating the socialist world in global health history

“…The West saw the socialist world through tropes of shortage: of basic necessities, consumer products, and provisions for health. In interactions with the WHO and the West, socialist countries themselves also drew on prevailing scarcity as an argument for material and political action, phrased along concepts of rights and expectations (Reinisch, 2013; Vargha, 2020). Shortage became a cornerstone of Cold War rhetoric, contrasted with the abundance of the West's market economy and healthcare.…”

“…While it is often represented as a unique enterprise to the Caribbean country, Cuba's medical internationalism was enabled by yet another international collaboration: in the early 1960s Eastern European countries, among them the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Hungary sent medical professionals to revolutionary Cuba to counter a severe shortage of doctors and nurses, at the same time when Cuba sent physicians to Algeria and later provided crucial primary healthcare to Angola (Vargha, 2018). Moreover, Eastern European countries delivered similar aid and intervention for North Korea and Vietnam (sometimes in collaboration, sometimes in competition with each other), building extensively on concepts of solidarity, brotherhood and the acknowledgement of a common revolutionary project, revealing a complex relationship between decolonization efforts, economic and geopolitical aims, propaganda and alternative imaginations of international health (Bruchhausen & Borowy, 2017; Hong, 2015; Iacob, 2021; Vargha, 2020).…”

Antibiotic resistance, planetary health and the mimetic trap: a historical account of present-day sanitary, environmental and social crises

“…In 1949, the US delegate to the WHO and his allies explicitly blocked Czechoslovakia from developing penicillin production plants for having turned to 'Socialism'. 38 In 1948, about two years after the inception of the WHO, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland each left the international agency because the United States and its allies withheld medical resourcesi.e. the knowledge and the technical apparatuses to produce antibioticsfrom Eastern Europe.…”

The past and present of pandemic management: health diplomacy, international epidemiological surveillance, and COVID-19

“…Yet, it seems that political rivalries and the resulting lack of international coordination and cooperation remain mostly unsolved, even today. While a worn-out "epidemic Orientalism" leads European and American politicians to blame China and Asian countries for having generated the pandemic and for denying civil rights through severe lockdowns (Rudyak et al 2021), the self-image of liberal, enlightened societies needs to be amended, and the history of health diplomacy is a convenient vantage point to do so (Brazelton 2020;de Almeida 2015;Vargha 2021). Rereading the relationship between European power politics, its economic interests and the biomedicine of the past is key to imagining and planning a different future for international health coordination.…”