COVID-19: The Political Economy of a Global Pandemic

It is two years since a microbe, SARS-CoV-2, a 'novel' coronavirus, travelled through the world to wreak havoc on the lives of humans across the globe. Although the total number of global COVID-19 deaths, currently estimated at 6 million, comes nowhere near the 50 million deaths of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19 to which it has been compared, the impact of COVID-19 and the measures to control it have been far more devastating to humans and economies. This virtual issue gleans insights from selected papers in previous issues of Development and Change to contribute to the ongoing debate on the COVID-19 pandemic by touching upon its political economy aspects. The articles put together in this virtual issue try to demonstrate that pandemics are not a 'fact of life'. They are very much rooted in the processes of capital accumulation and the ensuing destruction of the global ecosystems that makes zoonoses a recurring imminent threat. In the context of a hyper-connected globalized world, regional and global pandemics could well become the norm. Meanwhile, neoliberal reforms and restructuring have left the health sector unable to handle the public health crisis caused by COVID-19. At the same time, with the waiving and dilution of well-established norms of regulation for testing and marketing of vaccines and drugs, the pandemic has created opportunities for accumulation in the healthcare technology industry, specifically the pharmaceutical sector. It is hoped that this virtual issue will contribute to the ongoing debate on the emergence of 'novel' diseases and pandemics by shifting the current focus from the disease agent (the virus) and broadening the concern to include the larger social determinants which are rooted in the global political economy.