Overview

Martin Moore makes an informed historicisation of the COVID-19 crisis in Britain and the call to protect and save the British National Health Service. This appeal is closely linked to a temporal process of existential threats related to a brutal disinvestment in the health service and its articulation with a growing set of existential threats. On the other hand, a long trajectory of dominant political and cultural thinking has placed the elderly, "vulnerable" and "at risk" people in an ambiguous situation in the processes of social and economic hierarchisation.

National reactions to COVID-19 can only be understood by placing them in the long duration of national and international history and in the particularities of the decisions of the dominant structures and in the configuration of public policies.