covid coloniality

With the COVID-19 pandemic still raging around the world, people are still dying of other preventable diseases like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and Ebola. With the arrival of the latest mutation, Omicron - we're realizing that ignorance, entitlement, and hardheadedness can kill us just as easily too. 

Colonialism refers to the political and economic subordination of a nation or people to another nation. Distinct from colonialism, coloniality refers to the long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism. 

That's especially true in underdeveloped countries, places physician and anthropologist Eugene Richardson calls the global south. 

© AFP / Ed Jones - 'Fearless Girl'

The global public health system is broken because it perpetuates an imbalance of power rooted in colonialism. Reparations and economic investment are needed to improve public health and medical care in these countries.

The coloniality of power is a concept interrelating the practices and legacies of European colonialism in social orders and forms of knowledge, advanced in postcolonial studies, decoloniality, and Latin American subaltern studies. 

It identifies and describes the living legacy of colonialism in contemporary societies in the form of social discrimination that outlived formal colonialism and became integrated in succeeding social orders. 

The concept identifies the racial, political, and social hierarchical orders imposed by European colonialism in Latin America that prescribed value to certain peoples/societies while disenfranchising others.

To achieve global health equity there's got to be real economic change so that countries in the global south can use their riches to actually procure some of the lifesaving, transforming medical findings of the past century - from vaccines to antibiotics to everything we do in the hospital and with health care.