‘As the world nervously watches the rollout of the various covid-19 vaccines and surveys the human and economic cost of the pandemic, this period of optimism is hard to imagine. Yet Hotez, a pediatrician and a specialist in tropical infectious diseases at Baylor College of Medicine who co-directs a vaccine-development center at the Texas Children’s Hospital, shows that pandemics had been rebounding well before the first covid-19 cases emerged in Wuhan. His book draws lessons from the field of tropical infectious diseases, and also from his international work as a science envoy—a position created jointly by the State Department and the White House—during Barack Obama’s Presidency.
‘Hotez is perhaps uniquely positioned to expound a broad vision that marries science with geopolitics. (In the past year, he has been a prominent TV expert on the pandemic.) We learn not only about familiar scourges such as polio and diphtheria but also about a host of so-called neglected tropical diseases, including dengue, leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis, and Chagas. He melds an account of their biology with documentation of the social and political factors that enable them to spread, and passionately insists that we cannot prevent pandemics in isolation from wider global currents. He identifies a cluster of non-medical drivers of deadly outbreaks—war, political instability, human migration, poverty, urbanization, anti-science and nationalist sentiment, and climate change—and maintains that advances in biomedicine must be accompanied by concerted action on these geopolitical matters.’
Read here (The New Yorker, Mar 29, 2021)
