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Abstract
‘Preparing for the next epidemic’ has been a recurrent theme in global health in recent years. Starting with SARS, by way of the Avian influenza, and intensifying after the 2013–2016 Ebola outbreak, the urgency of preparing for the next health disaster has been recommended by numerous global health stakeholders. Recommendations and global partnerships are aligned with the many action proposals that have been formulated by international political actors, including the WHO, that have made ‘preparedness for the next epidemic’ a new paradigm, alongside prevention. The intent of this commentary is to argue the need to discuss some aspects of the preparedness paradigm from both health and democratic perspectives. We believe preparedness reveals a new and problematic biopolitical orientation in global health. Our argument is that preparedness enacts a model that: (i) reconfigures knowledge about epidemics by disconnecting them from the social and historical contexts in which they arise and (ii) imposes new modalities of intervention that raise issues for democratic autonomy. After first tracing back the genealogy of the preparedness paradigm, this paper then discusses some of the issues at stake for both health and democracy.
Acknowledgements
Authors are very grateful to Noemi Tousignant and Tarik Benmarhnia for their insightful comments. Authors also wish to thank the reviewers and Zoë Blowen-Ledoux for English translation. Finally, Pierre-Marie David is grateful to Guillaume Lachenal and Laboratoire SPHERE, Université Paris Diderot, were he was hosted and FRQSC (2016-B3-189967) for financial support. Nicolas Le Dévédec is grateful to HEC Montreal for financial support.
