Emerging Infectious Disease/Emerging forms of Biological Sovereignty

Abstract

Public health responses to emerging infectious disease (EID) rarely try to interrupt the mobility of goods and information. Rather, designed under the rubric of ‘‘public health security,’’ they extend the rationale of free circulation through efforts to intensify movement and communication between international agencies, national health (and defence) departments, and the pharmaceutical industry. In this way, public health security extends postliberal modes of transnational regulation. This article examines an unfolding scenario which is testing public health’s fidelity to the ethos of international trade agreements: Indonesia has withdrawn from the World Health Organization’s (WHO) ‘‘virus-sharing’’ scheme because WHO has facilitated the use of Indonesian samples of H5N1 for the commercial development of potentially profitable vaccines without consultation with the Indonesian labs in which they originated. It has been argued that the Indonesian move is one that contests the current securitization of global health. However, I argue that what we are witnessing is the process of emergence of a distinct form of biological sovereignty in the form of rival global health security aggregates, each working to inject a new form of postliberal sovereignty into the field of global public health.