In this podcast, CG steering group member Toby Green talks with John Perry, contributor to the London Review of Books, FAIR and other publications on Nicaraguan affairs.

Perry gives the perspective of the pandemic response in Nicaragua and Honduras, 2 neighboring countries in Central America. Honduras's neoliberal government followed the dominant lockdown policy, with harsh policing, and closed schools for 2 years: this led to high levels of excess death, and contributed to the collapse of the Honduran government at the end of 2021.

In Nicaragua, by contrast, the Sandinista left-wing government did not follow a lockdown model for fear of the socioeconomic and educational impacts. Perry describes how this policy proved to be more effective, with lower excess deaths, and a much lower socioeconomic effect to poorer communities. This was also made possible by years of health investment by the Sandinista government, with over 20 state-of-the-art hospitals built in the previous decade which helped to see the country through the first Covid wave.

In this CG conversation, Daniel Hadas talks to Caitjan Gainty about how the history of medicine and healthcare can illuminate our attempts to analyse and understand the Covid response. Set in the UK but branching out globally, the conversation winds through some of the thorniest of Covid era issues. Vaccines and vaccine mandates, for example, look quite different when set against the problematic and checkered history of global vaccination campaigns. And so do the logics of lockdown and the other non-pharmaceutical interventions, when considered in the context of evolving national security and public health programs over the past 50 years.

In unravelling these issues, further questions arise: what are the right historical moments, events, currents of thought to turn to when trying to contextualise the pandemic? And where does the way in which we choose to contextualise the Covid response intersect with other larger themes: the relationship between science and politics; the scientific and political imaginaries that govern our views of healthcare and medicine; the very nature and role of health in our lives.

British author, historian, and retired Supreme Court Judge, Lord Sumption, has been vocal throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, questioning the wisdom, necessity, and legality of the British government’s use of the 1984 Public Health Act to implement extraordinary lockdown measures.

In this in-depth conversation, Professor Bhattacharya sits down with Lord Sumption to explore pressing ethical and legal questions raised by the COVID-19 policy response, in addition to examining both the historical context and potential ramifications for the future.