Toby Green, The Covid Consensus: the new politics of global inequality. London: C. Hurst & Co. (hb £14.99 – 978 1 78738 522 1). 2021, 294 pp.

Abstract

Drawing from research reports, epidemiological models, newspaper articles, press conferences and white papers from national governments, universities and organizations such as the WHO, he pieces together a story of rapid consensus that would have been hard to imagine in 2019. Perhaps, then, it is less about the character of people’s political leanings (authoritarian or not) and more about a racialized understanding of Covid-19 (the ‘China virus’), driven by China’s influence on isolation and quarantine measures, that determined who has supported public health measures and who has not. The expansion of the social safety net in the USA, the global uprisings in the summer of 2020, and a new attention to the central tenet of public health – to care for and protect the vulnerable – have all offered new possibilities for thinking about how we live together and how we support one another in this world.