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Global health security is an increasingly complex regime. The failures of global governance and norms of cooperation during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the re-entrenchment to nationalist policy-making have created impetus for new governance arrangements, institutions and policy development. These changes include amendments to the International health regulations (IHR), development of a pandemic convention or accord, convening of the High-Level Meeting on Pandemic Preparedness and Response, establishment of the Pandemic Fund, and development of the medical countermeasures platform, among others. These various developments claim to be in synergy with each other, but understanding of regime complexes and forum shifting from international relations reveal the power dyna mics which underlie these processes. I use these concepts to demonstrate how states are transferring negotiations from one institutional location to another in search of more favourable outcomes, or are creating strategic uncertainty within negotiations to avoid future accountability. I further highlight three risks posed by these developments: (i) an increasingly complex landscape for global health security; (ii) erosion of the World Health Organization's authority in global health security; and (iii) dominance of high-income state positions within these negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the anti-mask and anti-lockdown online movement in connection to the COVID-19 pandemic. To combat the spread of the coronavirus, health officials around the world urged and/or mandated citizens to wear facemasks and adopt physical distancing measures. These health policies and guidelines have become highly politicized in some parts of the world, often discussed in association with freedom of choice and independence. We downloaded references to the anti-mask and anti-lockdown social media posts using 24 search terms. From a total of 4209 social media posts, the researchers manually filtered the explicit visual and textual content that is related to discussions of different genders. We used multimodal discourse analysis (MDM) which analyzes diverse modes of communicative texts and images and focuses on appeals to emotions and reasoning. Using the MDM approach, we analysed posts taken from Facebook and Instagram from active anti-mask and anti-lockdown users, and we identified three main discourses around the gendered discussion of the anti-mask movement including hypermasculine, sexist and pejorative portrayals of "Karen", and appropriating freedom and feminism discourses. A better understanding of how social media users evoke gendered discourses to spread anti-mask and anti-lockdown messages can help researchers identify differing reactions toward pandemic measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policies and public health efforts have not addressed the gendered impacts of disease outbreaks.[1] The response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) appears no different. Although sex-disaggregated data for COVID-19 show equal numbers of cases between men and women so far, there seem to be sex differences in mortality and vulnerability to the disease.[2] Emerging evidence suggests that more men than women are dying, potentially due to sex-based immunological[3] or gendered differences, such as patterns and prevalence of smoking.[4] However, current sex-disaggregated data are incomplete, cautioning against early assumptions. Experience from past outbreaks shows the importance of incorporating a gender analysis into preparedness and response efforts to improve the effectiveness of health interventions and promote gender and health equity goals. [Extracted from the article]