We Need a Public Health Revolution

We Need a Public Health Revolution: n a matter of weeks, Covid-19 has irrevocably changed society’s expectations about the role of government in protecting health. The nature of the threat — which is likely to endure in one form or another until an effective vaccine can be developed, mass-produced, and then efficiently administered on a large scale — has left the global population highly dependent on state intervention to guarantee its physical safety and in many cases its economic livelihood. In the UK, as in other countries, the legitimacy of our system of government now rests on its ability to institute proportionate and effective measures to avoid excessive numbers of deaths while allowing some forms of essential economic activity to continue.

In one short shock, this crisis has overturned the neoliberal notion that individuals are best placed to manage and navigate risk in the modern world, while government is there to simply nudge us, and to steer and shape the market environment to meet our preferences. This shift is profound and destroys the excessively narrow conception of ‘health policy’ which has come to dominate thinking about the role of government in relation to the health of the population.

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