Beyond COVID-19: The Influence of Infectious Diseases on Public Health Policy (Pre-Recorded)

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Wealthy, industrialized nations have afforded the luxury of averting attention away from the threat of most infectious diseases over the last half century, focusing primarily on noncommunicable diseases as the main causes of morbidity and mortality. Despite this low salience, communicable diseases continue to be a risk for all nations, with historically oppressed and marginalized populations at highest risk of infection and adverse health outcomes from communicable diseases including HIV/AIDS and neglected tropical diseases in the southern United States such as hookworm and Zika. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to forefront the reality of infectious diseases as population health threats. With anthropogenic climate change, these risks will only increase over time.

Despite this, limited political science research to date has examined the politics of infectious disease policy, and almost no research to date has examined the relationship between the politics of infectious disease and other areas of public health policy. In spite of this limited salience, the politics of infectious diseases have likely always influenced other areas of public health policy, especially for policies targeting high-risk populations facing overlapping threats from communicable diseases, noncommunicable diseases and social determinants of health . In the era of COVID-19, public health policy cannot escape the influence of the pandemic on the policy process.

This panel draws together research from junior and senior scholars that directly addresses these emergent concerns, a more complete understanding of which is fundamental for both a full account of the politics of health and efforts to understand public policy development and implementation going forward in the era of COVID-19 and beyond. In the first paper, McMurtry focuses on the partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans in their risk perception of infectious disease outbreaks over the last half-century and their intention to receive a vaccine. For the second paper, Singh examines the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on public support for health policy issues beyond COVID-19, including noncommunicable diseases, opioids, and vaccinations. In the third paper, Willison evaluates the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on policy development and implementation in local and delegated-state homeless governance systems across the United States. In the final paper, Kronebusch examines whether state responses to COVID-19 reflect the prevalence of infection or instead reflect political factors.

Together, the papers identify a range of political constraints on public health policy shaped by infectious diseases and the politics of infectious diseases, as well as potential avenues for policy change going forward. The papers also clarify the ways in which the particular features of infectious disease policy create a distinguishing set of political dynamics in public health policy development.

(Pre-Recorded Discussant)

Sub Unit

• Division 48: Health Politics & Health Policy

Individual Presentations

• Trends in Political Polarization During Disease Outbreaks from Polio to COVID-19 (Pre-Recorded) - Caitlin McMurtry, Harvard University

• The Influence of COVID-19 on Public Support for Health Policy (Pre-Recorded) - Renu Singh, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• Harm Reduction in a Pandemic: Opportunities and Challenges for Homeless Policy (Pre-Recorded) - Charley Ellen Willison, Cornell University; Kasia Klasa, University of Michigan; Scott L. Greer, University of Michigan; Julia A Wolfson, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

• Responses to Covid-19: Party, Ideology, Health Interests, and State Policymaking (Pre-Recorded) - Karl Kronebusch, CUNY-Baruch College

Chair

• Sarah E. Gollust University of Minnesota

Discussant

• Jonathan Purtle Drexel University