The Politics of Public Health Emergencies of International Concern
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) was created by the International Health Regulations (2005) and is WHO's highest level of alert for a health emergency. PHEICs are declared by the WHO Director-General on the basis of a recommendation provided by the International Health Regulations (IHR) Emergency Committee. This paper challenges the orthodox thinking around PHEIC declarations, using a methodological approach that has not been used in this space, through a series of interviews with those involved in the PHEIC declaration process. This paper provides vital insights into the PHEIC process, allowing us to fully understand what happens “in the room” during these deliberations, something which until now, has not been possible. We argue that the PHEIC declaration, and the Emergency Committee's role in this process, is not a politically neutral technocratic one, as is commonly claimed by WHO, but a highly politicized process that is driven by a range of factors beyond the criteria set down in IHR. We show that the PHEIC is informed by health surveillance practices that operate within the colonial construction of “global health security,” which is clearly embedded within every level of the PHEIC declaration process.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it