Thread by @JesseBump

Every person, every institution in #globalhealth is deeply indebted to people of S Asia, esp India, present and past. Acknowledge and honor it: speak up about the #COVIDSecondWaveInIndia and culpability of government and others who have failed them. What debt? I'll explain 1/n

Nearly every aspect of vaccination campaign knowledge has links to India. From first vax 219 years ago in then-Bombay to eradication, smallpox more about India than any other country, as @JoyAgnost has written. World has benefitted but knowledge came from colonial oppression 2/n

Note how 1805 painting applies racist lightening to Queen Devajammani's arm, showing one exercise of colonial biopower on reluctantly or unwillingly vaccinated people (see Chancellor, Mod Asian Stud 2001). Nearly all early major campaigns were in India 3/n

The campaigns were racist, insensitive. Vaccine was grown in cows, then in orphans, other outcasts + forcibly given. British technology, but there was older local practice of variolation in India, other places upon which the vaccine was based. This violence yielded knowledge 4/n

Medical crimes perpetrated in name of Western superiority underly our knowledge of vaccination and distribution campaigns. Smallpox eradication--its final apex in India--led to UNICEF's EPI, which led to @gavi. If you have ever had a vaccine, then you should thank S Asians 5/n

Throughout this history Western schools and researchers have been prime beneficiaries. Pursuing knowledge, advancing health... + furthering themselves with good careers, high pay w/o investing in others. Calls to #decolonize global health are informed by asymmetric benefits 6/n

A lot of that knowledge is gated behind paywalls, legally but unethically protected by IPR regimes, and otherwise inaccessible to the people whose bodies and lives have been interrogated to produce it. India still a top site for clinical trials. Main schools still in US/UK. 7/n

Later generations interrogated inequality and racism with insights no metropolitan scholar would have imagined: Guha, Sarkar, Spivak and many others forged a new epistemic basis for history, decolonization, and the pursuit of knowledge 8/n
asianstudies.github.io/area-studies/s…

After ousting the British, the independent government of India was a primary force in the pursuit of decolonization for other countries. Like the G77? The Non-Aligned Movement? Worked with SEARO? Admired Alma-Ata Declaration? Done math? Used a zero? Thank the people of India 9/n

As #COVID19India crisis rages, Western academics and institutions that fashionably cite "health for all" need to step up advocacy for the people of India. They have always been there for us, despite all the atrocities done to them. What will you do? @HarvardChanSPH @LSHTM? 10/10