Review of: Nicole Hasson's, Global Health Impact: Extending Access to Essential Medicines

Global Health Impact: Extending Access to Essential Medicines

(Oxford University Press: 2020)

By: Nicole Hassoun

Reviewed for Choice Magazine by Ronald F. White

This interdisciplinary book argues that all human beings have a right to access the “essential medicines” that restore and/or maintain health. With nearly 100 pages of footnotes and references, this book’s target audience is interdisciplinary scholars who have (at least) a working knowledge of rights-based ethics and health policy. Most critics will agree that this book is not easily accessible to a popular audience. Chapter 1 claims that all human beings ought to have an enforceable legal right to health, including access to essential medicines for diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS in order to live a minimally good life. Chapter 2 suggests that this legal right will foster “creative resolve” on the part of duty-bearers who address shortcomings. Chapter 3 presents creative new ways to use data on health and address the medicines problem. Chapter 4 argues for initiating Global Health Impact labeling on pharmaceutical products. Chapter 5 explores how consumers should feel about their newfound economic power that arises from these labeled goods. Chapter 6 explains how “Experimental political philosophy” conducted under the aegis of Global Health Impact initiatives might expand traditional philosophical inquiry and perhaps reveal how labeling reform might affect consumer choices, including socially responsible purchase decisions of pharmaceutical products and decisions to invest/divest in various pharmaceutical companies. This important book will be well received by scholars who already have a working knowledge of both philosophical ethics and health. Critics might question how/why the growing Covid-19 pandemic was mentioned in the Preface, but not covered in the text. At a bare minimum, that issue should have been covered last minute in the Appendix, or an Afterthought. Critics might wonder why the author and/or publisher did not postpone publication long enough to shed (at least some) early light on the most devastating global pandemic in recent history? 

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