In global health, we don’t just observe what happens: we work to improve the health of people and populations. Based on scientific evidence and history, we know that viruses don’t stop at borders. If we don’t work to prevent disease, we know that infections and chronic conditions run rampant. If we don’t have strong health and social systems and invest in our health workforce, we know that the best products remain inaccessible to most of the world’s people. We work hard because we believe in our individual and collective agency.

Yet in the face of rising extremist politics (in many countries not just only extreme and/or radical-right, but also radical-left), we appear to be paralyzed. Over the past decade, I have heard and read again and again that ‘it’s our job to focus on science, not politics’, ‘we deal with health, other sectors are responsible for other issues’, and ‘we’ll risk losing our funding if we engage’. Despite our knowledge that people’s and entire populations’ health depends on political decisions (e.g. implementation or dismantling of human rights, solidarity schemes, funding priorities), we act as if the abovementioned dire trend is all out of our control and we have no agency.

As more countries (and states in decentralized democracies) are flipping to the extreme & radical-right (or left, and in some cases both), the current response – which I’d summarize simply as ‘mostly silence, or too opportunistic, too vague, too late’ – isn’t working. Many of us already feel that history is repeating itself – not just from HIV to Covid to mpox, but also with the rollback on human rights (including refugees’, women’s, and LGBTQI+ rights, as well as civilians in war zones).

History rarely repeats itself, it is said. Yet, as we head toward 2030, the world increasingly resembles not the future we aspire to and could have, but rather a bleak repeat of the 1930s.

 

 

Never again? My street in Berlin, in 1933. “Berliner Orte, Be.bra.verlag. 2017“