Globalization and Health in the COVID Era

In 2019, I published my book Globalization and Health, which looked at the relationship between these two key concepts. In it, I argued that globalization may increase our vulnerability to infectious disease outbreaks, but it also provides us with the tools and opportunities to stop disease outbreaks before they spread too quickly. A few months after the book was published, the global COVID-19 pandemic began. In this chapter, I reflect on how the book’s arguments hold up in light of our collective lived experience with the pandemic since 2019. I highlight three areas in which the interplay between health and globalization(s) deserves greater attention, and I take myself to task for not giving more direct and explicit attention to the international political economy of global health.