COVID-19, global public health justice, and the culture of organized irresponsibility

This article deploys the language of risk to offer a sociological perspective on the discourse of responsibility in the context of the governance and mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. While current debates about global public health justice often tend to overemphasize the role of legal action as a key measure in today’s global public health justice initiatives, the article argues that lack of adequate legal mechanisms – such as a global statute on public health crimes – constitutes only one barrier to the attainment of global public health justice. By and large, the failed administration of public health during global pandemics will not induce criminal prosecution on a worldwide scale and this is not because of lack of adequate legal channels but mostly because of the way in which world risk society reshapes the meaning of responsibility. The article argues that the COVID-19 pandemic is a manufactured risk that is being dealt with within a culture of organized irresponsibility that obfuscates accountability and liability for risk-creation and risk-management and transforms culpability for such risk-creation and risk-management into acquittal. Effective approaches to global public health justice, then, cannot be limited to the introduction of international legal safeguards but need to include a project for the social redistribution of bads and reallocation of global responsibility for risk-creation and risk-management.