A COVID Charter, A Better World

By Toby Miller

Rutgers University Press

With unprecedented speed, scientists have raced to develop vaccines to bring the COVID-19 pandemic under control and restore a sense of normalcy to our lives. Despite the havoc and disruption the pandemic has caused, it’s exposed exactly why we should not return to life as we once knew it. Our current profit-driven healthcare systems have exacerbated global inequality and endangered public health, and we must take this opportunity to construct a new social order that understands public health as a basic human right.

A COVID Charter, A Better World outlines the steps needed to reform public policies and fix the structural vulnerabilities that the current pandemic has made so painfully clear. Leading scholar Toby Miller argues that we must resist neoliberalism’s tendency to view health in terms of individual choices and market-driven solutions, because that fails to preserve human rights. He addresses the imbalance of geopolitical power to explain how we arrived at this point and shows that the pandemic is more than just a virus—it’s a social disease. By examining how the U.S., Britain, Mexico, and Colombia have responded to the COVID-19 crisis, Miller investigates corporate, scientific, and governmental decision-making and the effects those decisions have had on disadvantaged local communities. Drawing from human rights charters ratified by various international organizations, he then proposes a COVID charter, calling for a new world that places human lives above corporate profits.

Toby Miller offers bold governing principles to secure the rescue, perhaps even the thriving, of humans and the planet. However one might amend his charter, it is impossible to reject its premise, which positively screeches from Miller's accounting of how the pandemic was lived in four nations: we cannot go on like this. Wendy Brown, author of In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West

The COVID pandemic has made it possible for many to see that the current economic system and the legislation that it promotes do not work. Toby Miller makes a cogent argument for the need to change course in economic and social policy, both nationally and globally. With his strong reputation in cultural and media studies, and more recently in Latin American Studies, I am confident that this project will have a significant impact in those fields and beyond. George Yúdice, author of The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era

The Environment of the Vaccine – the Vaccine and the Environment,' by Toby Miller Democratic Left

Toby Miller offers bold governing principles to secure the rescue, perhaps even the thriving, of humans and the planet. However one might amend his charter, it is impossible to reject its premise, which positively screeches from Miller's accounting of how the pandemic was lived in four nations: we cannot go on like this. Wendy Brown, author of In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West

The COVID pandemic has made it possible for many to see that the current economic system and the legislation that it promotes do not work. Toby Miller makes a cogent argument for the need to change course in economic and social policy, both nationally and globally. With his strong reputation in cultural and media studies, and more recently in Latin American Studies, I am confident that this project will have a significant impact in those fields and beyond. George Yúdice, author of The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era

The Environment of the Vaccine – the Vaccine and the Environment,' by Toby Miller Democratic Left

TOBY MILLER is the Stuart Hall Professor of Cultural Studies at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana—Cuajimalpa in Mexico City, and the Sir Walter Murdoch Distinguished Collaborator at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. The author or editor of over fifty books, his most recent works include The Persistence of Violence (Rutgers University Press), How Green is Your Smartphone? (with Richard Maxwell), and Greenwashing Culture.

Introduction: The Year of the Mask
1 Before the Crisis
2 During the Crisis
3 After(?) the Crisis
4 The Charter
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

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