Sick with Development: The Critical Links of SARS-CoV-2 for Latin America and the Caribbean
Gonzalo Basile1
The article identifies the critical links that characterize the response to the SARS-CoV-2 public health emergency with totalizing, reproducible, monocultural, unique and universal pretensions applied to both the State and Latin American and Caribbean societies. Four links are analyzed and characterized: the first, the society-nature metabolism as a determinant of the pandemic process and the strengthening of a geopolitics of power in the growing expansion of the global health security agenda as a priority of the prevailing accelerated, asymmetric, and dehumanized world system; a second critical link, in the foundations of an epidemiology and public health governed by microbiology in the design and management of interventions against individual and collective epidemic risk; thirdly, articulated to this, the re-actualization of the doctrine of contagion in the 21st century as the preeminent grammar of the sociopolitical language of human and social relations to think about an epidemic, articulated to what we call the transfer of the classic clinical and institutional protocols of prevention and control of hospital infections as massive population health measures reproduced towards society; and the fourth link, is about the hybrid and rapid institutional arrangements to fragile, segmented, and chronically underfunded Health Systems. Finally, the potential of a horizon of refounding health systems on the basis of critical thinking in health is outlined in order to weave a defense of the good life of the societies of the South.
1- Director and researcher of the International Health Program, Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), Dominican Republic. Co-coordinator of the CLACSO Working Group on International Health and Health Sovereignty.
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