Introduction

If the global HIV pandemic and more localised outbreaks of SARS, Ebola and the Zika virus, among others, did not convince us that infectious diseases have been far from conquered, then COVID‐19 must certainly have done so. In the past few months, questions about the global coronavirus pandemic – its cause, distribution, health and social impacts, and how best to limit its reach through public health measures – have re‐centred emerging infectious diseases in public and scholarly discourse.¹1 At the time of writing, recent news reports have begun to focus on global protests against racist police and state violence that have been prompted by the murder of George Floyd by White police officers in the United States. Such coverage has helped surface important messages about how inequality and systemic racism threaten the lives of Black People, Indigenous Peoples and People of Colour. And yet, COVID‐19 continues to act as a key framing device in such news stories in, for example, claims about how the protests represent a public health risk.

Like past epidemics, COVID‐19 has been characterised by widespread fear and anxiety, social disruption and dramatic inequalities of suffering and death. The incredible speed with which COVID‐19 has become a worldwide phenomenon, the dramatic force of public health responses, and the endless cacophony of information about the virus and pandemic strain collective efforts to make sense of what is going on.

In thinking and writing about COVID‐19 we have found the notion of the ‘politics of prevention’ a helpful orienting concept. Much sociological writing on public health and on epidemics is coordinated conceptually by trajectories of thought about risk and risk governance (Bunton et al. 2003, Petersen and Bunton 1997, Petersen and Lupton 1996, Polzer and Power 2016).²2 See also the journal Health, Risk and Society.
This makes good sense, given the centrality of technologies and discourses of risk within public health. And yet, the established possibilities for critique afforded by risk thinking, including the now characteristic, if belaboured, focus on neoliberal forms of healthy citizenship and governance of the self, seem too limited to fully address the political, social and economic consequences of the public health response to COVID‐19.

In this commentary, we suggest how the politics of prevention can act as a heuristic device for framing reflections on key dimensions of the public health response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. We begin by sketching out what might be meant by the politics of prevention, emphasising two linked, underlying assumptions: the possibility of scientific prediction and the capacity for controlled government intervention in social life (Freeman 1992). Drawing on the situation in Ontario, Canada, we then offer remarks on tensions and struggles arising in efforts to scientifically know COVID‐19 and to intervene through a range of different public health measures. We stress, in our concluding remarks, that officials have accorded insufficient attention to a variety of unintended consequences that accompany these measures that sociologists of health and illness are well positioned to help illuminate.

中文翻译：

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COVID-19，公共卫生和预防政治

介绍

如果全球艾滋病毒大流行以及SARS，埃博拉和寨卡病毒等更局部的疫情未能使我们相信传染病远未被克服，那么COVID-19一定可以做到。在过去的几个月中，有关全球冠状病毒大流行的问题（其原因，分布，健康和社会影响，以及如何通过公共卫生措施最好地限制其传播）的问题已将公众和学术界的新兴传染病重新集中。^1个1在撰写本文时，最近的新闻报道已开始关注全球针对种族主义警察和国家暴力的抗议活动，这些抗议活动是由美国白人警察谋杀乔治·弗洛伊德（George Floyd）引发的。这样的报道帮助人们传达了有关不平等和系统种族主义如何威胁到黑人，土著人民和有色人种生活的重要信息。然而，COVID-19在此类新闻报导中仍继续充当关键的框架，例如声称抗议活动如何构成公共健康风险。

像过去的流行病一样，COVID-19的特征是普遍存在恐惧和焦虑，社会混乱以及痛苦和死亡的严重不平等现象。COVID-19成为世界性现象的速度令人难以置信，公共卫生应对的戏剧性力量，以及有关病毒和大流行毒株的无休止的信息混乱，人们共同做出努力以弄清正在发生的事情。

在思考和撰写COVID-19时，我们发现“预防政治”概念是一个有用的导向概念。公共卫生和传染病很多社会学的写作是对风险和风险管理的思想轨迹（班顿在概念上的协调等。2003，彼得森和班顿1997年，彼得森和拉普顿1996年，Polzer和Power 2016）。²2另请参见《健康，风险与社会》杂志。
考虑到技术和风险话语在公共卫生中的中心地位，这很有意义。然而，风险思维所提供的既定的批判可能性，包括现在的特征（如果被迷惑的话）集中在健康的公民身份和自我治理的新自由主义形式上，似乎太局限了，无法完全解决公众的政治，社会和经济后果对COVID-19的健康反应。

在这篇评论中，我们建议预防政治如何充当启发式手段，以框架思考对COVID-19大流行的公共卫生应对措施的关键方面。我们首先勾勒出预防政治的含义，强调两个相互关联的基本假设：科学预测的可能性以及政府对社会生活进行控制的干预能力（Freeman 1992）。然后，我们将利用加拿大安大略省的情况，对在科学上了解COVID-19并通过一系列不同的公共卫生措施进行干预的过程中出现的紧张和挣扎进行评论。在结束语中，我们强调，官员们对这些意外后果未给予足够的重视，这些意外后果伴随着健康和疾病的社会学家能够很好地帮助阐明这些措施的措施。