From COVID-19 to MPox: Lessons from the Humanities?

On 14 August 2024, MPox was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the WHO. Soon after, there arose a perhaps natural proclivity towards comparison between COVID-19 and Mpox.

We keep telling ourselves that it is important to learn the lessons of COVID-19, but there is little agreement on whether there is any lesson, what it is, and whether it applies to different diseases. What counts as appropriate response to infectious disease outbreaks depends on contested tradeoffs between different values - for instance, civil liberties vs public safety or lives vs livelihoods. With the heavy disagreement around such tradeoffs, it is unclear what exactly we can learn from the COVID-19 experience, except for the fact that an infectious disease outbreak is likely to bring to light underlying disagreement about the proper place of health, of science, of trust in authorities in our system of values. But perhaps therein lies one of the main lessons of the COVID-19 experience: health crises generate disagreement that, in normal times, doesn’t express itself to such an extent. This lesson can be better understood from a humanities perspective.

This workshop will bring together the perspective of history, philosophy, medical geography and other humanities approaches to investigate what the humanities can contribute to learning lessons from the COVID-19 experience, in view of handling MPox and other future infectious disease crises. It will also discuss a blogpost by Alberto Giubilini, Tolulope Osayomi, and Utsa Bose on this topic.

Program

12.00: Sandwiches and coffee on arrival

Chair: Erica Charters, Faculty of History, University of Oxford

12.15: Utsa Bose, University of Oxford: History

12.25: Alberto Giubilini, University of Oxford: Philosophy

12.35: Tolulope Osayomi, University of Ibadan and AfOx Fellow, University of Oxford: Medical Geography (on Zoom)

12.45: Mofeyisara Omobowale, University of Ibadan: Medical Anthropology (on Zoom)

1.00 – 1.30 pm Discussion

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