CFP: Developing World Bioethics Special Issue: Access to Essential Medicines for Global Health and the Human Right to Health

CLOSING DATE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 15 December 2022

The  COVID-19 pandemic raises again pressing questions about global health justice and access to new vaccines and other essential health technologies. These include:

-            Does every person have a human right to health and a right to access these technologies?

-            Must rich countries assist poor ones in securing them?

-            Should pharmaceutical companies expand access to essential treatments?

-            Must companies provide these medicines at reasonable price points?

-            What does corporate social responsibility require in pandemic preparedness and response?

-            How can consumers make a difference and what does ethical consumption require with respect to global health?

-            How, if at all, can international organizations, companies, and individuals incentivize new research and development of vaccines and other essential medicines?

-            How, if at all, should countries, companies, and other organizations increase their investments’ global health impact?

These questions are connected by concerns about equitable access to new vaccines and other treatments for devastating diseases, like COVID-19, and how they affect the overall flourishing of individuals, nations, and the world as a whole. Indeed, this connective tissue suggests that COVID-19 highlights ongoing issues in global health justice – and in the complicated ways in which public and private institutions impact realization thereof.

The special issue will address these topics and be organized around themes from Nicole Hassoun’s book Global Health Impact: Extending Access to Essential Medicine, which argues that every person around the world has a human right to health and a right to access essential medicines. The book engages with work in ethics and economics on measuring health and new proposals for addressing the access to essential medicines problem and considers how countries, companies, and individuals can incentivise greater access to essential medicines, e.g. though the Global Health Impact project (global-health-impact.org/new). Papers should focus on three specific themes:

(1) The Human Right to Health,

(2) Global Access to Medicines and Measurements of Health Burden & Impact, and

(3) Corporate Social Responsibility & Ethical Consumption.

We welcome scholars from bioethics, philosophy, law, economics, public policy, and other relevant areas to address these themes and especially welcome works at the intersections of these discrete fields. This is not a book symposium but focuses more broadly on themes raised in the text. However, engaging with the book will be beneficial where it helps ensure thematic coherence across the treatment of these related issues.           

For further submission requirements, refer to the Author Guidelines on the Developing World Bioethics website: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/14718847/homepage/forauthors.html

Manuscripts should be submitted to Developing World Bioethics online at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/dwb.

Please ensure that you select manuscript type ‘Special Issue’ and state that it is for the Access to Essential Medicines for Global Health and the Human Right to Health Special Issue.