ISSN: 2574-187X
Authors: Ilise L Feitshans JD*
This article examines the operationalization of nanotechnology’s revolutionary promises through the lens of the Coronavirus (“Covid-19”) crisis. As predicted by the USA National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) report to the President of the United States in1999 , nanotechnology has revolutionized how science views physical properties of matter and thus has revolutionized commerce by offering new products and ways to package and transport those products that seemed like science fiction a century before. Heralding a fourth industrial revolution, nanotechnology in everything from mascara lipstick, packaging, instant clothing, 3D printed housing, nanomedicine and meat grown in laboratories in outer space a has impacted health rights and health care from cosmetics to the cosmos. For workers and the families who have school children impacted by Covid-19 Emergency Executive orders to “stay in place”, nanotechnology is both a friend offering employment and elearning as well as a foe: enabling people to continue remote working; but increasing their financial hardship when people must absorb their own workplace overhead without additional support from their employers, oversight by safety and health regulators or investment back-up. For workers who did not originally intend to be telecommuters but are now finding themselves obliged to work at home, nanotechnology provides rapid communication but also enables a barrage of fake news and disinformation. Nanotechnology as an accelerator of travel in global commerce may, if unfettered by nanoregulation, present civil society with unacceptable levels of risk. Nanotechnology and nano-enabled medicines also make possible rapid telehealth communication at home, in-home. ehospital monitoring, transfer of data in remarkably large quantities, implementation of new risk communication models and galvanize scientific collaboration without regard to borders or geographic differences. Lessons learned from pandemics of the past underscore that work health and the survival of civil society are inextricably linked. Civil society is brought to halt whenever the quality of human life is threatened by pandemic, and Covid-19 fits the playbook of pandemic paradigms from the Great Plague of 1665-6 to the HIV/AIDS pandemic of the late twentieth century that has not been stopped or erased by Covid-19. History teaches that commerce in civil society stops, courts close, and already strained governmental infrastructures become dysfunctional to the brink of anarchy when pandemic forces citizens to self-isolate or quarantine to stop spreading disease. Therefore the link between health, work and the greater economy within society becomes impressively clear during pandemics. Lessons learned from historical precedents of pandemics and from the progress of Covid-19 across the globe demonstrate that a need for disaster planning to provide coordinated response to pandemics is not unprecedented but are sorely needed. And, a false dichotomy between health care costs as a commodity juxtaposed against competing economic concerns is inapposite: commerce cannot survive without healthy people to work, consume products and services and cleanup afterwards. These same issues appear universally across legal systems, regardless whether the governance structure is a tyranny, monarchy, democracy, fascist or an admixture of governance strategies. Thus, the Covid-19 crisis illuminates the significance of health as a civil right akin to the rights of people with disabilities, even in nations where health rights are not protected under the national constitution. Abolishing this false dichotomy of health versus economic growth is therefore a first step towards recognition of the need for public health capacity building, and then developing political will to support public health infrastructure.
Keywords: Nanotechnology; Covid-19; Public Health
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