Inclusion and exclusion of expertise in global pandemic prevention.

Since the 1990s, health experts have anticipated that we would be hit by an influenza pandemic in the not-too-distant future (cf. Caduff 2015; Lakoff 2008; Weir, Mykhalovskiy 2010). While we may have thought of pandemic primarily in terms of Covid-19 over the past two years, influenza pandemics have long represented the paradigmatic case of pandemic preparedness planning. I will use this paradigmatic case to trace how the understanding of pandemics in the global field of pandemic prevention has changed over the past 30 years and how this has affected the question of what expertise is relevant to pandemic prevention. I show that due to a newly established disaster perspective on infectious diseases, a holistic form of world observation has prevailed that promises to include diverse expertise. In doing so, I also demonstrate inconsistencies in the semantics and reality of expert advice by considering the application of this holistic pandemic perspective to the Covid-19 pandemic emergency.