The Great Disruption: COVID-19 and the Global Health Crisis

The Zambakari Advisory is proud to present our Fall 2020 Special Issue: “The Great Disruption: COVID-19 and the Global Health Crisis.” To produce a quality perspective and shine a nuanced light on this health crisis, we invited prominent scholars, medical doctors, epidemiologist and social scientists to share with you the evolving pandemic as it is seen and experienced and battled around the world. Whereas much still remains unknown, untested and unpredictable, only by committing to an all-encompassing, all-inclusive, multidisciplinary approach can we begin to fight back successfully. While we encounter and try to understand new evolutions in the virus and our treatment of it, this is not the first time the world has been confronted with such a challenge. Our universality has provided the coronavirus with more rapid transmission opportunities than ever before, but we cannot turn our backs on the broad lessons we have learned from our fights against such vicious 20th-century killers as the Spanish (1918-20) and Asian (1957-58) flus, the HIV virus that causes AIDS (1981-present), the H1N1 swine flu (2009-10), the West Africa Ebola pandemic (2014-16) and the Zika virus in South and Central America (2015-present). This issue’s collection features seven articles contributed by such respected voices as Marc Lipsitch, John P. A. Ioannidis, Jonathan Fuller, Graham E. Fuller, Dirk Hansohm, Asha Abdel Rahim, Rose Jaji and Paul Gormley. In the first paper, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard University’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Marc Lipsitch, writes that we “should use every possible source of insight at our disposal to gain knowledge and inform decisions, which are always made under uncertainty — rarely more so than at present” when faced with the complexities of the COVID-19 pandemic. Next up, F. Rehnborg Professor in Disease Prevention in the School of Medicine, and a professor of epidemiology at Stanford University, John Ioannidis offers timely insight, noting that “failing to correct our ignorance and adapt our actions as quickly as possible is not good science. Nor is politicizing scientific disagreement or looking away from the undeniable harms of our well-intentioned actions.” The University of Pittsburgh’s Jonathan Fuller, assistant professor of history and the philosophy of science, takes his turn next, writing that epidemiology “must be split-brained, acting with one hand while collecting more information with the other. Only by borrowing from both ways of thinking will we have the right mind for a pandemic.” In the fourth paper, Graham E. Fuller, a former senior CIA official and former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, contributes to our Fall Issue with a look at the COVID-19 pandemic and a warning that “It would be too bad if all we aspire to is only to return to business as usual once this particular virus has been beaten back.” Following Fuller’s thoughts, co-contributors Dirk Hansohm and Asha Abdel Rahim explore the ingredients necessary to combat COVID-19, including quality governance, interdisciplinary research, international cooperation, an EU offer of support to the countries of Africa and more. The authors admit that, at best, “the world in Europe and beyond will not return to the same state as it was before.” In the sixth paper, a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Zimbabwe, Rose Jaji writes, “It is time for Africa to be proactive and to actively participate in finding solutions for itself instead of waiting for richer nations to assist.” In her article, she looks at the challenges African countries face in battling the pandemic, especially in light of their limited resources. The final piece is penned by Paul Gormley, a professor of criminal justice administration and chair in social science at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida. Gormley contributes his thoughts on the COVD-19 pandemic and, specifically, how the correctional system and its actors are at risk. He concludes that, short of “herd immunity” or a vaccine, the system as it exists and operates today is in danger of being “crushed.”