Title: How the World Turned into a Laboratory
Subtitle: The Long Road to the COVID-19 Pandemic
Subject Classification:  COVID-19, Sociology, Healthcare  
BIC Classification: HB, MJCJ, MBP
BISAC Classification: HIS037030, SOC026000, HEA001000
Binding: Hardback, Paperback, eBook
Publication date: 08 Feb 2025
ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-83711-022-3
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-83711-023-0
ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-83711-024-7

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Description

This book provides a comprehensive history of the COVID-19 pandemic.

At first glance, the pandemic struck as a natural disaster, with the sudden emergence of a virus as a major threat from outside. However, the pandemic has a history. SARS-COV-2 arrived in a world that was already very much focused on viruses, health, and longevity, and in which the fear of epidemics had already led to the mobilization of knowledge, technology, and a wide range of institutions to prepare us. The book develops the argument that these pre-existing structures and sensitivities have to a large extent determined the political and other reactions to the SARS-COV-2 virus and how the debates on the measures to halt its circulation have unfolded.

Biography

Author(s):  Bert De Munck is full Professor at the History Department at the University of Antwerp, Belgium.

Reviews

"Bert De Munck’s How the World Turned into a Laboratory begins from a fact that has drawn remarkably little scholarly reflection. In January 2020 the World Health Organization described the lockdown of Wuhan as unprecedented in the history of public health and not a measure it had ever recommended. By March lockdowns were being imposed across Europe as the only conceivable response. Investigating how so remarkable a shift could occur so quickly, De Munck writes as a historian of early modern Europe who takes the long view. He traces the pandemic response through the apparatus of “pandemic preparedness,” through the statistical practices that made an invisible virus a matter for governance, and back to the nineteenth century, when salvation migrated from God to science. Reading that response through Foucault’s biopolitics, he shows how technocratic advice arrived already carrying an ethical judgment, above all that the quantity of life takes precedence over its quality. His analysis of pandemic-era democracy will be of particular interest to political scientists. He shows how the Covid response collapsed the distinction between government and opposition, dissolved accountability into the space between elected officials and their advisers, and equated the public interest with the institutional interests of hospitals. The book closes with a plea for humility about what we can know and control, an apt coda to a pandemic that ended as pandemics have before—with the virus settling into endemicity, notwithstanding all the interventions that had been arrayed against it. Wise, unflinching, and deeply learned, it is the critical history this subject demanded."
- Frances Lee, Professor of Politics and Public Affairs, Princeton University