The Making of a Pandemic: Social, Political, and Psychological Perspectives on Covid-19 (SpringerBriefs in Psychology)

The Making of a Pandemic provides a systematic account of how societal and psychological forces shaped the Covid-19 pandemic. The first part focuses on how biological and societal factors interact to create a pandemic. The second part explores how characteristics of the American economy, the American approach to public health, and domestic and international inequality combined to prolong the pandemic, hamper mitigation efforts, and arouse opposition to cooperation with public health measures. The third part examines the psychological processes that led to resistance to efforts to mitigate the pandemic and linked the resistance to right-wing ideologies. The book concludes by looking at the limits of the technical and medical reforms others have proposed to protect us from repetitions of the Covid-19 disaster and by calling for a "deep confrontation" with the societal and psychological factors that created and shaped the pandemic. Comprehensive framework for understanding how sociological, political, and psychological factors interacted with biomedical factors to produce the Covid-19 disaster Essential reader for understanding how to prevent future pandemics Explores the sources of the widespread resistance to cooperating with mitigation efforts Acknowledgments 7 Contents 9 About the Author 11 Chapter 1: Introduction 12 References 15 Part I: The Revenge of the Microbes 16 Chapter 2: The Brief Conquest of Infectious Disease 17 References 23 Chapter 3: Pandemics as Social Disorders 27 A Pandemic Is a Social Disorder 27 References 35 Chapter 4: The Sources of Pandemics 36 Getting Sick: Increased Exposure to Wild Animals 37 Getting Sick: Deforestation 38 Getting Sick: The Livestock Revolution 41 Getting Sick: Global Warming 43 References 44 Chapter 5: From Disease to Pandemic 49 COVID-19 and the Lab Leak Hypothesis 52 References 56 Part II: The Failed Response 60 Chapter 6: The Roots of Disaster 61 References 71 Chapter 7: The Failure of the “Invisible Hand” 75 References 81 Chapter 8: The Handcuffing of the Public Health System 85 Narrowing the Mission of Public Health 91 References 98 Chapter 9: The Cost of Inequality 103 References 110 Part III: The Resistance to Mitigation 114 Chapter 10: The Crooked Timber of Humanity 115 References 127 Part IV: The Deep Lessons 135 Chapter 11: The Fourth Horseman 136 References 146 Index 150