Paper short abstract:

The Ebola emergency opened neoliberal doors of opportunity for fast-tracking development of nascent treatments and vaccines that were lingering in national laboratories and the intellectual property drawers of biotech companies. Health system strengthening will advance via biotechnology assemblages.

Paper long abstract:

WHO's Declaration of a "Public Health Emergency of International Concern" (PHEIC) in August 2014 nearly five months after Guinea notified them of an outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD), opened the door for emergency response. Lakoff (2014) has suggested that the techno-political meaning of EVD sparked the change in WHO's response, notably "the extent to which …its capacity to provoke a global health emergency - depended on the condition of the local public health infrastructure". I suggest that the Declaration opened the neoliberal doors of opportunity and incentives for fast-tracking development of a host of nascent treatments and vaccines that were already lingering in the refrigerators of national laboratories and the intellectual property drawers of biotech companies. The EVD emergency may well be a seachange for multilateral recognition of the need for community engaged health system strengthening, but, so too, it will have to incorporate the global biotechnologies assemblage. WHO's aspirations to achieve national core competency for disease surveillance will now need to extend to and engage with communities to meet minimal global standards of detection, communication and response. Engaged support and integration with WHO's Global Vaccine Action Plan will be fundamental to a coordinated essential global disease surveillance and vaccine implementation program. The lack of capacity and capabilities of healthcare workers to respond sufficiently to a crisis is a crisis in and of itself, and the die is cast that the gaming of market failure for treatments and vaccines for emerging and neglected diseases will shape the vehicle of delivery.