Health as a Human Right: A Fake News in a Post-human World?
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LOCAL/GLOBAL ENCOUNTERS
Health as a Human Right: A Fake News in a Post‑human World? Gianni Tognoni1 · Alejandro Macchia2
© Society for International Development 2020
Abstract Based on a synthetic overview that embraces the evolution of the ‘health’ concept, and its related institutions, from the role of health as the main indicator of fundamental human rights—as envisaged in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—to its qualification as the systems of disease control dependent on criteria of economic sustainability, the paper focuses on the implications and the impact of such evolution in two model scenarios which are centred on the COVID-19 pandemia. The article analyses COVID-19 both in the characteristics of its global dynamics and in its concrete management, as performed in a model medium income country, Argentina. In a world which has progressively assigned market values and goods an absolute strategic and political priority over the health needs and the rights to health of individual and peoples, the recognition of health as human right is confined to aspirational recommendations and rather hollowed out declarations of good will. Keywords Right to health · Inequities · Post-human era · Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) · Global Burden of Diseases · Argentina · Health metrics · Economy · Universality paradigms
The Need for a Conceptual Framework The title of an article where a question mark follows a provocative statement could easily sound as a rhetoric artefact rather than the formulation of a real research hypothesis. To provide a clearer answer to this doubt, and a full justification of the legitimacy and relevance of the question mark, let’s start with a few preliminary considerations and explanatory notes, which we deem necessary as a general conceptual and methodological framework. Here they come, in this logical sequence: • The two domains associated and confronted in the
question posed in the title—public health and human rights—have been the long-term professional field of the authors. Both of them have been engaged mainly in intense research activity related to field projects and thematic areas where they have directly crossed, and experienced, the often conflicting tension and interaction between the point of view of ‘health’ as a fundamen-
* Alejandro Macchia [email protected] 1
IRCCS, Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico, Milan, Italy
Fundación GESICA (Grupo de Estudio en Investigación Clínica en Argentina), Buenos Aires, Argentina
2
tal human and peoples right, and that of ‘health’ as an increasingly dominant component of market rules. Since the Seventies, model health areas have included drug policies such as the WHO essential drugs, innovative population clinical trials, critical epidemiological use of large databases, normative regulations of accessibility to health technologies (Tognoni et al. 2019). A parallel line and a different type of research that both authors have conducted has focussed on the causes and consequences of massive violations of peoples
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