What COVID-19 revealed about health, human rights, and the WHO

Abstract

As of July 2020, COVID-19 has caused over 600,000 deaths, with 17 million confirmed cases, and counting. The World Health Organization (WHO), the global governance organization charged with providing health for all, declared a pandemic of on March 11, signaling the beginning of the global response to the disease. Despite a commitment to human rights and health, the WHO and others have been virtually silent on how rights and pandemic management go together, and have largely relied on techniques that date back to the 1918 flu epidemic. COVID-19 has made painfully obvious the tension between the protection of public health and the protection of human rights. The "rights-based approach" to health espoused by the WHO needs to be reexamined in light of how public health and human rights may, in times of crisis, work at cross-purposes. We show this through an analysis of the WHO's COVID-19-related publications. As a doctor I would say let's put tanks in the streets and let's do a police state. … But the Western world has different realities (Guido Marinoni, president of the Bergamo Doctor Association, in response to Italy's policies in the COVID-19 crisis (as quoted in the New York Times, April 24, 2020; Horowitz and Bubola 2020). Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic, or social condition.

Crisis politics of dehumanisation during COVID-19: A framework for mapping the social processes through which dehumanisation undermines human dignity

“…As such, the analysis here is unique because I spell out the concrete mechanisms through which dehumanisation generates actual and material abuses in the context of a crisis. Besides, so much of the COVID-19 and human rights literature thus far has documented the abuses without developing a broader explanatory framework for explaining dehumanisation during crises (Chiozza and King, 2022;Clay et al, 2022;Greer et al, 2021;Lundgren et al, 2021;May and Daly, 2020;Wong and Wong, 2020). In redress of that neglect, I present an explanatory framework, as shown by Figure 1, which presents the four macro-social processes of dehumanisation amid a global crisis.…”

Who Cares? Exclusion, Empathy and Solidarity

“…Th ose who remain unvaccinated are concentrated among a subset of "uninsured adults, Republicans, rural residents, white Evangelicals, those without college degrees, and young adults. " 10 Th eir grounds for resisting vaccination vary, with some pointing to the speed with which the vaccines were developed or the supposed eff ects of vaccination as evidence of potential harm. Others oppose the COVID-19 vaccination politically, in the name of manifesting their freedom to resist government control over their bodies or movement.…”

Pandemic discourse

“…While the pandemic is defined along the lines of health issues, the political dimension also needs close scrutiny given Wong and Wong's (2020) Hungary, Romania, Algeria, Thailand, and the Philippines are among the countries that have instituted new laws or invoked emergency decrees giving authorities the power to block websites, issue fines, or imprison people for producing or spreading false information during the pandemic. In Cambodia and Indonesia, social media users have been arrested after allegedly posting false news about the coronavirus.…”