Building an internationalist response: Sonia Shah on the Covid-19 webinar series

This episode is an extract from the first in our series of webinars focused on Covid-19, which featured a presentation by Sonia Shah, author of Pandemic: Tracking contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond (2017), as well as contributions from experts on public health systems and activists on the frontlines responding to the crisis in the Global South.

Images from Italy of the army unloading coffins, exhausted doctors and fearful citizens in ever more countries  shocked the world and pushed even recalcitrant politicians into action.

But the real health disaster could still be ahead of us as the pandemic spreads in countries in the Global South, impoverished by decades of policies of neoliberal austerity, with weak public health systems and people already in highly precarious conditions. It will not be enough to respond at only a community or national level. How can social movements mobilise an internationalist response?

Panellists: 

- Sonia Shah, award-winning investigative science journalist and author of Pandemic: Tracking contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond (2017).

- Luis Ortiz Hernandez, public health professor in UAM-Xochimilco, Mexico. Expert on social and economic health inequities.

- Benny Kuruvilla, Head of India Office, Focus on the Global South, working closely with Forum For Trade Justice.

- Mazibuko Jara, Deputy Director, Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education, helping to coordinate a national platform of civic organisations in South Africa to confront COVID-19.

This webinar, organised by Transnational Institute and co-sponsored by Alternative Information and Development Centre, South Africa and Focus on the Global South/Asia, is available in full: 

www.tni.org/webinars