Hostname: page-component-7f64f4797f-tldsr Total loading time: 0.001 Render date: 2025-11-04T02:47:48.033Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Casualties of preparedness: the Global Health Security Index and COVID-19

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2021

Manjari Mahajan
Manjari Mahajan*
Affiliation:
The New School, New York, US
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: mahajanm@newschool.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The 2019 Global Health Security Index (GHS Index) assessed the US and the UK as the two countries best prepared to address a catastrophic pandemic. The preparedness rankings of this index have had little correlation with the actual experiences of COVID-19 in various countries. In explaining this disrepancy, the paper argues that better indicators and more data would not have fixed the problem. Rather, the prevailing paradigm of global health security that informs instruments such as the GHS Index needs to be interrogated. This dominant paradigm narrowly conceptualises global health security in terms of the availability of a technical infrastructure to detect emerging infectious diseases and prevent their contagion, but profoundly undertheorises the broader social and political determinants of public health. The neglect of social and political features is amplified in instruments such as the GHS Index that privilege universalised templates presumed to apply across countries but that prove to be inadequate in assessing how individual societies draw on their unique histories to craft public health responses.

Keywords

Global Health Security Indexpandemic preparednessrankingsCOVID-19political determinants of health

Information

Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 17 , Special Issue 2: Numbers in an emergency: The many roles of indicators in the COVID-19 crisis , June 2021 , pp. 204 - 214
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Adams, V (2016) Metrics: What Counts in Global Health. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, J (2020) The U.S. and COVID-19: Leading the world by GHS Index Score, not by response. NTI Atomic Pulse. Available at https://www.nti.org/analysis/atomic-pulse/us-and-covid-19-leading-world-ghs-index-score-not-response/ (accessed 1 February 2021), Reprint, GHS Index.Google Scholar
Boyd, MJ, Wilson, N and Nelson, C (2020) Validation analysis of Global Health Security Index (GHSI) scores 2019. BMJ Global Health 5, e003276.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
de Waal, A, Klot, J and Mahajan, M (2010) HIV/AIDS, security and conflict: new realities, new responses: AIDS Security and Conflict Initiative. Forced Migration Review. Available at https://www.fmreview.org/AIDS/deWaal-et-al.htm (accessed 1 February 2021).Google Scholar
Fidler, D (2005) From international sanitary conventions to global health security: the new international health regulations. Chinese Journal of International Law 4, 325–392.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fukuda-Parr, S (2014) Global goals as a policy tool: intended and unintended consequences. Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 15, 118–131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garrett, L (1994) The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Garrett, L (2015) Ebola's lessons: how the WHO mishandled the crisis. Foreign Affairs September/October, 80–107.Google Scholar
GHS Index (2020) Welcome to the 2019 Global Health Security Index. GHS. Available at https://www.ghsindex.org/ (accessed 1 February 2021).Google Scholar
Gostin, L, DeBartolo, MC and Friedman, EA (2015) The International Health Regulations 10 years on: the governing framework for global health security. Lancet 386, 2222–2226.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hacking, I (1991) The making and molding of child abuse. Critical Inquiry 17, 253–288.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, A (2017) Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mahajan, M (2008) Designing epidemics: models, policy-making, and global foreknowledge in India's AIDS epidemic. Science and Public Policy 35, 585–596.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mahajan, M (2019) The IHME in the shifting landscapes of global health metrics. Global Public Policy 10, 110–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merry, SE (2011) Measuring the world: indicators, human rights, and global governance: with CA comment by John M. Conley. Current Anthropology 52, S83–S95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ravi, SJ et al. (2020) The value proposition of the Global Health Security Index. BMJ Global Health 5, e003648.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Razavi, A, Erondu, N and Okereke, E (2020) The Global Health Security Index: what value does it add? BMJ Global Health 5, e002477.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Resolve to Save Lives (2020) A report card for preparedness. Available at https://resolvetosavelives.org/prevent-epidemics/readyscore (accessed 1 February 2021).Google Scholar
World Health Organization (WHO) (2008) International Health Regulations (20085), 2nd edn. Geneva: WHO.Google Scholar