Confronted with pandemics, bioterrorism, and emerging infectious diseases, governments are transforming their security policies to include the proactive development, acquisition, stockpiling, and mass distribution of new pharmaceutical defences.
What happens – politically, economically, and socially - when governments try to protect their populations with pharmaceuticals? How do competing international interests among states, pharmaceutical companies, regulators, and scientists play out in the quest to develop new medical countermeasures? Do citizens around the world ultimately stand to gain or lose from this pharmaceuticalization of security policy?
In this seminar, Stefan Elbe, Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, will present his latest book Pandemics, Pills & Politics, in which he explores these questions through the story of the world's most prominent medical countermeasure – Tamiflu.
Professor Stefan Elbe is the director of the Centre for Global Health Policy and a professor of international relations at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Strategic Implications of HIV/AIDS, Security and Global Health, and Virus Alert: Security, Governmentality, and the AIDS pandemic.