The pharmaceuticalisation of security: Molecular biomedicine, antiviral stockpiles, and global health security

Abstract

Abstract. Pharmaceuticals are now critical to the security of populations. Antivirals, antibiotics, next-generation vaccines, and antitoxins are just some of the new 'medical countermeasures' that governments are stockpiling in order to defend their populations against the threat of pandemics and bioterrorism. How has security policy come to be so deeply imbricated with pharmaceutical logics and solutions? This article captures, maps, and analyses the 'pharmaceuticalisation' of security. Through an in-depth analysis of the prominent antiviral medication Tamiflu, it shows that this pharmaceutical turn in security policy is intimately bound up with the rise of a molecular vision of life promulgated by the biomedical sciences. Caught in the crosshairs of powerful commercial, political, and regulatory pressures, governments are embracing a molecular biomedicine promising to secure populations pharmaceutically in the twenty-first century. If that is true, then the established disciplinary view of health as a predominantly secondary matter of 'low' international politics is mistaken. On the contrary, the social forces of health and biomedicine are powerful enough to influence the core practices of international politics -even those of security. For a discipline long accustomed to studying macrolevel processes and systemic structures, it is in the end also our knowledge of the minute morass of molecules that shapes international relations.

The (Mis)appropriation of HIV/AIDS advocacy strategies in Global Mental Health: towards a more nuanced approach

“…The reasons for this focus on treatment are varied, including successful advocacy for the right to access treatment, growing evidence for the effectiveness of treatment as prevention [ 63 ], and a desire to avoid addressing the issues that in many societies make prevention activities politically and culturally sensitive [ 64 ]. In part, however, the focus on treatment also reflects broader trends of medicalization and pharmaceuticalization, in which drug-based solutions are seen as the ‘go-to’ solution for pressing health challenges [ 65 ], and healthcare rights are envisioned primarily as being rights to those drugs.…”

The war for the future

“…Civil–military and dual-use projects thereby play into understandings of a security continuum between internal and external security that accelerate strategic international competition in high-tech research and development. The enemy thereby shifts forms and wanders between the dimensions of the global to the microscopic, from global climate change (Rothe, 2016), to terrorist organisations, viruses (Elbe, 2014) and eventually even single base pairs of our DNA that are causing hereditary diseases. Each is understood to require a technological solution.…”

Challenging contingency: Viruses and the nature of molecular life

“…The stockpiling of pharmaceuticals to combat the constantly and continuously mutating, changing and evolving (Elbe et al, 2014: 450; Elbe, 2014: 929) nature of influenza viruses (see also Diprose et al, 2008: 282) has also been noted in response to the specific threat of H5N1 or ‘bird flu’ in 2005. In this case governments across Europe stockpiled antiviral medications such as Oseltamivir, also known as Tamiflu, in order to facilitate a preparedness response.…”

“…Such pharmaceuticals support and make possible political programmes of preparedness. In the field of biopolitical security studies, a particular conception of the nature or inherent workings of life at the molecular level in terms of its randomness or contingency has been identified as a driver behind these processes (see Braun, 2007; Cooper, 2006; Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2008, 2009; Dillon and Reid, 2000, 2001; Diprose et al, 2008; Elbe, 2014; Elbe et al, 2014; King, 2002; Kittelsen, 2009; Lakoff, 2008; Roberts and Elbe, 2017). As a consequence, other understandings of the nature of molecular life in this field have been overlooked.…”