The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services just defunded and debarred the EcoHealth Alliance for five years. EHA presents itself as a key leader in the One Health approach to characterizing and intervening into infectious disease dangers. The debarment stemmed from EHA's ill-supervised coronavirus gain-of-function studies in China.
I had written about these gain-of-function projects since mid-2020 and on EHA's misappropriation of the concept of One Health since 2016.
The epistemological-political conflict has since moved to the global stage. Scientists around the world have been recruited to One Health under the EHA and other Global North banners. Others have come to reject the concept as the latest in colonial medicine.
I wrote this dispatch upon the request of organizers of a Fiocruz Rio de Janeiro series on the "Structural Crisis of Capital, Climate Emergency and Social Determination of Health".
The dispatch, in which EHA makes an appearance, aims to help situate the One Health approach in its political economy as a mode of research and as a form of governance.
Robert G. Wallace, Ph.D.
Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps
St Paul, MN
website: https://arerc.wordpress.com/