Pandemic SyllabusBY DAVID BARNES, MERLIN CHOWKWANYUN, & KAVITA SIVARAMAKRISHNAN, faculty in the Health & Societies major at the University of Pennsylvania and in the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
“We are three historians of public health who focus on different time periods and geographic areas. We have constructed this syllabus to provide a range of voices and perspectives that give context not just to COVID-19 but also to the medical, scientific, cultural, political, and economic structures that shape this and other pandemics. They are structures that, beyond biology alone, are often what make pandemics selectively—and unequally—deadly.”