The Four Critical Links of SARS-CoV-2 in Latin America and the Caribbean: Challenges for Health from the South

Basile Gonzalo

doi:10.36959/856/517

Abstract

Based on a review of the country experiences and the critical documentary analysis of contents, policies and actions, this paper characterizes the critical links in the response to the public health emergency of SARS-CoV-2 with comprehensive, reproducible claims, unique, monocultural and universal applied both to the State and to Latin American and Caribbean societies.

Highlights

In order not to repeat the philosophical-theoretical assumptions of public health as an agent of the modern state of the 20th century, the positivist method and structural functionalism, it is essential to look at and analyze severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-CoV-2 in a different way
This article seeks to characterize the governance of the response to the public health emergency of SARS-CoV-2 guided by a rationality inherent to a radical biomedicalization and securitization that placed at the center of the global and regional strategy an epidemiology and public health/disease colonized by the protocolization of microbiology transferred to the dynamics of life in society and the reproduction of global health security parameters in the face of the accelerated destruction of capitalism
At the same time the use of toxics, chemicals for agriculture, mining, and other extractive activities of nature are intensifying. This microbiologization of public health in the face of epidemic dynamics, I implant a preparation of health establishments, with ‘parachute’ activities. Parachute actions are those where financial, human and medical-sanitary resources are pumped to a place of outbreak or public health emergency to put out a particular epidemiological fire, which can mitigate the distribution and trend of a disease at that time, but does little to systematically address the structuring processes and determinations of collective health [7] that make some populations, families, and individuals susceptible to patterns of unjust and preventable diseases and deaths

Summary

Introduction

In order not to repeat the philosophical-theoretical assumptions of public health as an agent of the modern state of the 20th century, the positivist method and structural functionalism, it is essential to look at and analyze SARS-CoV-2 in a different way. Parachute actions are those where financial, human and medical-sanitary resources are pumped to a place of outbreak or public health emergency to put out a particular epidemiological fire, which can mitigate the distribution and trend of a disease at that time, but does little to systematically address the structuring processes and determinations of collective health [7] that make some populations, families, and individuals susceptible to patterns of unjust and preventable diseases and deaths These premises, knowledge, practices, and epistemology applied to public health emergencies and social and environmental disasters in the 21st century, as had already occurred with other endemics and epidemics, produced some institutional reflections that are registered comparatively in several countries of the region: 1. Decoloniality/Decolonial turn: As Maldonado Torres,et al [65], Arturo Escobar and Chantra Mohanty detail, the dynamization of a change in the coordinates of emancipatory thought from which the liberal modernity of the global Center is conceived and its structuring and reproductions are subverted in the ways of thinking and doing in health

Interculturality

South South

Horizontality