Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health. Eugene T. Richardson. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. 2020. Xxv+193pp. Price $25.00 ISBN 9780262045605

• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Author: Elias Madzudzo,Gillian Chomutare Madzudzo
• Date: 01 September 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.521

DOI: 10.1002/wmh3.521

BOOK REVIEW

Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global

Public Health

Eugene T. Richardson

Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. 2020. Xxv+193pp. Price $25.00 ISBN 9780262045605

Epidemic Illusions is an anthropological study of global policies on epidemics and attendant

medical practices. As an anthropologist, physician, and faculty member of Harvard Medical

School, Eugene Richardson is well placed to analyze medical practice in complex historical

and social environments. As a story line, the book points out that epidemics—as health

threats to humankind that defy political or physical boundaries—provoke global public health

policies and interventions whose outcomes are mediated by an intersection of historical,

structural, and political dynamics.

Richardson argues that global epidemic management is biased in a number of ways. Bias

in dealing with epidemics is informed by and follows the contours of, among other

things, colonial history; race as a marker of alterity and belittlement; gender; manipulated

statistics; and medicalization. A key pillar and instrument in this biased public health policy is

the discipline of epidemiology with its pretence to expert knowledge and precision based on

the use of unreliable big data (p. 67ff). The outcome of this bias in epidemic control is a

“coloniality of global public health,”which can be described as the reproduction, reinforcement

and normalization of a global pathology of racism, uneven coverage of the world by

pandemics, and blame‐the‐victim analyses by a subservient rent seeking intelligentsia.

Richardson concludes his analysis with a call for social inquiry with a broader focus to include

history, politics, and science.

Coloniality, for Richardson, is the legacy of colonial practices in states that, at face value,

are considered sovereign. Colonial legacy is manifest in, among others, racial, political,

gender, ideological, economic and modes of thinking that still reflect the priorities of global

capital. More specifically, the thesis is that the suffering caused by infectious diseases in the

Global South is unnecessary because the world is replete with the resources to prevent and

cure the diseases. However, official analyses of the situation use science to promote a

vocabulary of coloniality. According to Richardson, examples of this pathology include

institutionalized racism, economic exploitation, and control over identity and knowledge

(p. 4). Promoters of coloniality, for example, the World Health Organisation (WHO), global

health research and humanitarian agencies and international nongovernmental organisa-

tions, instrumentally employ public health policy that manages and perpetuates global health

inequality (p. 43ff). In Richardson's view, epidemiology as an academic discipline is the

handmaiden of global health inequality through applying statistical models to avoid a holistic

analysis of health problems. The key problem is that its assumptions tend to be ahistorical

and apolitical and provide findings that pander to privileged class interests, such as the view

that “human victims are the agents of spread”of infectious diseases, brushing aside the

critical fact that prolonged “predatory accumulation by foreign elites became embodied as

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