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How liberal governments manage knowledge, ignorance, prediction and uncertainty has attracted increased attention across the social sciences. In this paper, we analyse the strategy and rhetoric of the UK government during the COVID-19 pandemic, with particular attention to the first half of 2020. We see the initial UK policy response – as well as its later legitimation – as a form of 'politics of impossibility', effecting political change through claims of incapacity or impotence. We argue this approach departs from the uses of knowledge and ignorance in both classical liberalism and neoliberalism, and suggests the emergence of a new, hybrid form of governance which can be dubbed liberal fatalism. We discuss the relevance of this new form of governance for political futures of an increasingly volatile world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Issue of Global Public Health on Politics & Pandemics brings together 26 articles and commentaries that address diverse aspects of the politics of COVID-19 and related issues. These papers are grouped together in six topical areas: theories and politics of global health, health systems and policies, country responses, social inequalities, social responses, and the politics of science and technology. The goal of the Special Issue is to give readers a sense of the range of topics that have been a focus for research in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic and to provide diverse examples of how research and analysis on the political dimensions of the pandemic can contribute to confronting the COVID-19 crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the vocabulary of 'medical populism' to identify and analyse the political constructions of (and responses to) the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, the Philippines, and the United States from January to mid-July 2020, particularly by the countries' heads of state: Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte, and Donald Trump. In all three countries, the leaders' responses to the outbreak can be characterised by the following features: simplifying the pandemic by downplaying its impacts or touting easy solutions or treatments, spectacularizing their responses to crisis, forging divisions between the 'people' and dangerous 'others', and making medical knowledge claims to support the above. Taken together, the case studies illuminate the role of individual political actors in defining public health crises, suggesting that medical populism is not an exceptional, but a familiar response to them. This paper concludes by offering recommendations for global health in anticipating and responding to pandemics and infectious disease outbreaks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shlomit's Yadlin-Gadot's paper, "The Carnivalesque Politics of a Pandemic Body," carries us into a bit of a wild, carnival-like experience: a dazzling array of images, disguises, and visual metaphors delivered with a powerful immediacy. I will stay as close as I can to what Yadlin-Gadot has presented, while at the same time trying to translate her brilliant conceptual array of terms about Covid-19, carnival and trans-subjectivity in a way that may help us define them while touching on the big questions she poses in her dual ending: What can relational thought offer in times of Covid-19, and what can Covid-19 offer relational thought in terms of a challenge? Or, where does the carnivalesque take us in terms of theory, and where does theory take us in terms of the carnivalesque? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covid-19 has affected our lives in innumerable and formerly unimaginable ways. Among its effects is the threat to our identity in terms of broken bodily boundaries, severed social contacts, and a blurring of our group belongings. A response to this mingled physio-social threat has been an unprecedented surge of trans-subjectivity, as a form of intersubjectivity that is both elevated and reduced. In this paper, this phenomenon is explored in its carnivalesque manifestation, expressing itself as both a revolt against state control and an effort to re-appropriate a sense of bodily self and other. I illustrate these ideas with theoretical, visual and clinical materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several emerging technologies for agri-food systems are promoted by supporters as alleviating the instabilities of COVID-19 and thus increasingly necessary and inevitable. Compelled to pivot towards the pandemic, technologists align their projects with narratives of safety, security and resilience. This paper highlights the political contours of these technologies, arguing that proposed innovations are far from neutral paths toward a more sanitary and secure agri-food future. Most are limited in their capacity to disrupt patterns of racial and geopolitical hierarchy, ecological precarity, and concentrated power in the food system, or to fulfill pandemic relief promises in their current form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the COVID-19 pandemic now affects the entire world, countries have had diverse responses. Some responded faster than others, with considerable variations in strategy. After securing border control, primary health care approaches (public health and primary care) attempt to mitigate spread through public education to reduce person-to-person contact (hygiene and physical distancing measures, lockdown procedures), triaging of cases by severity, COVID-19 testing, and contact-tracing. An international survey of primary care experts' perspectives about their country's national responseswas conducted April to early May 2020. This mixed method paper reports on whether they perceived that their country's decision-making and pandemic response was primarily driven by medical facts, economic models, or political ideals; initially intended to develop herd immunity or flatten the curve, and the level of decision-making authority (federal, state, regional). Correlations with country-level death rates and implications of political forces and processes in shaping a country's pandemic response are presented and discussed, informed by our data and by the literature. The intersection of political decision-making, public health/primary care policies and economic strategies is analysed to explore implications of COVID-19's impact on countries with different levels of social and economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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We examine how internet media outlets in key Anglo-American democracies differed under a similar external shock: the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. COVID-19 posed a special challenge to democracy, juxtaposing it with alternative forms of government, which may be better positioned to deal with such a crisis. The online media, as the watchdog of democracy, played a key role. As the pandemic started to spread worldwide, three democracies – the USA, Canada, and New Zealand – were of particular interest. The USA had the highest number of cases and deaths, considerably more than its neighbor to the north. NZ was the democracy that most effectively dealt with the pandemic. We comprehensively study the coverage of the outbreak on the internet website of a newspaper of record in each. Data were harvested for the universe of 27,089 articles published online between mid-February and early May on the websites of the New York Times, New Zealand Herald, and the Globe and Mail. Natural learning processing and dependency parsing are the methods used to analyze the data. We find meaningful differences between the outlets in timing, structure, and content. Compared with their US counterpart, the online watchdogs of democracy in Canada and NZ – where COVID-19 politics were far more effective – barked louder, clearer and 2 weeks earlier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 crisis has demanded that governments take restrictive measures that are abnormal for most representative democracies. This article aims to examine the determinants of the public's evaluations towards those measures. This article focuses on political trust and partisanship as potential explanatory factors of evaluations of each government's health and economic measures to address the COVID-19 crisis. To study these relationships between trust, partisanship and evaluation of measures, data from a novel comparative panel survey is utilised, comprising eleven democracies and three waves, conducted in spring 2020. This article provides evidence that differences in evaluations of the public health and economic measures between countries also depend on contextual factors, such as polarisation and the timing of the measures' introduction by each government. Results show that the public's approval of the measures depends strongly on their trust in the national leaders, an effect augmented for voters of the opposition. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1930754. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]