As a contemporary historian of the global AIDS response, I am interested in how societies across the world respond to epidemics. The recent COVID-19 epidemic has demonstrated how national and global public health, biomedical research, pharmaceutical companies, media and information-sharing networks and sociocultural spheres of civil society discussion have evolved since the 1980s. In a series of blog posts, I will explore themes connecting key themes of the current COVID-19 crisis to my research on the history of global AIDS. These include: the establishment and debates over global/national disease surveillance, the roots of vaccination fascination, pharmaceutical industry responses, the specific case of Japan and global health and development agency responses. Finally, the social experiences of disease responses around the world are important topics for a contemporary global historian, particularly in an era of almost universal internet infrastructure.
These posts will naturally be limited by the information available at the time and are not meant to serve as public health advice. It is also not the historian’s role to focus on controversies and rumours without considering a wide range of viewpoints and drawing from themes and information in my own grey literature archival research of international agencies, pharmaceutical corporations, national governments, etc. However, the posts will reflect my own biases and perspectives on the current situation given my research on the history of the global AIDS response in India. Most importantly, without the benefit of hindsight, there will be a lack of resolution in the themes explored. Therefore, while I am part of a research institution based in the UK, I take full responsibility for the views stated here, and hope the reader understands the cases when analytic themes explored that do not end in neat takeaway arguments.
As an early career researcher, this series is also a learning experience in making my discipline and field interesting and useful to a broader audience, developing a methodology for historicising future epidemics and learning other forms of presentation and audience interaction. I hope offer the reader will be absorbing other perspectives to arrive at their own independent conclusions.