Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to the massive development and use of health indicators. Drawing on the history of international public health and of the management of infectious disease, this paper attempts to show that the normative power acquired by metrics during the pandemic can be understood in light of two rationales: epidemiological surveillance and performance assessment. On the one hand, indicators are established to evaluate and rank countries’ responses to the outbreak; on the other, the evolution of indicators has a direct influence on the content of public health policies. Although quantitative data are an absolute necessity for coping with such disasters, it is critical to bear in mind the inherent partiality and precarity of the information provided by health indicators. Given the growing importance of normative quantitative devices during the pandemic, and assuming that their influence is unlikely to decrease in the future, they call for close scrutiny.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 186-203 |
| Number of pages <span style="color:red"p> <font size="1.5"> ✽ </span> </font> | 18 |
| Journal | International Journal of Law in Context |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jun 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:9It was previously named the IHR monitoring questionnaire. 10The two other instruments are qualitative: simulation exercises and after-action review. In addition, note that the OIE has also developed its own assessment tool – the Performance of Veterinary Services Pathway (OIE, 2019). 11See e-SPAR State Party reporting tool, available at https://extranet.who.int/e-spar. The fact that Europe and the Americas are often better rated than South East Asia calls into question these indicators, considering how the COVID-19 pandemic has been handled in these regions. All Internet sources were accessed on 1 February 2021. 12See Prevent Epidemics website, available at https://preventepidemics.org/. PreventEpidemics is a project that aims to help governments to prevent disease outbreaks. It was created by the Resolve to Save Lives Initiative, an organisation notably funded by the Bloomberg Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 13See GHS Index website, available at https://www.ghsindex.org/. This indicator was created by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Economic Intelligence Unit. 14See the ‘About’ page on the GHS Index website, available at https://www.ghsindex.org/about/.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press.