Privacy, Exploitation and Global Disease Surveillance: Can We Justly Prevent the Next Pandemic?

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, global health organizations have called for the implementation of robust global disease surveillance systems to recognize and respond to emerging pathogens. These active surveillance technologies would have a significant global benefit by preventing the spread of current pandemics and informing future pandemic responses. In this paper, I examine the extent to which we can sacrifice individuals' privacy through global disease surveillance in order to benefit current and future generations. First, I outline disease surveillance technologies and explain how disease surveillance would occur primarily in low-income, rural communities in the Global South. Next, I outline privacy-related harms that these individuals would experience as a result of disease surveillance. I argue that within our current distributional system for global health resources, pandemic surveillance would impose privacy-related burdens on marginalized communities, who would receive inadequate benefits from these programs. This is unfair because it exploits the worst off in order to benefit individuals in wealthy nations. I conclude that to justifiably implement global disease surveillance, we ought to adopt a 'prioritarian' approach to health distribution. To impose privacy-related burdens on the worst off, we must ensure that they benefit significantly.