THE HEALTH ORDER.

For most of the twentieth century, medicine was treated as the one domain that stood above politics - a shared human project, governed by science and administered by institutions that everyone agreed to trust. The Health Order argues that this was never quite true, and that in the last two decades it has stopped being true at all.

The book follows the money, the molecules and the rules. It traces how the manufacture of essential medicines concentrated in a handful of countries, how patents and regulatory approval became instruments of leverage between states, how pandemic preparedness turned into a negotiation over who owns pathogens and who owns the data, and how the gas in an MRI scanner or the insulin in a pharmacy became questions of national security.

It is not a book against the pharmaceutical industry, nor a defence of it. It is a map: who depends on whom, for what, and what happens to a country when the map changes and it discovers it cannot make, buy or regulate the medicines its population needs.

It is written for people who run institutions, advise governments, invest in health or teach the next generation to do any of these things - and for anyone who has noticed that the word “sovereignty” now appears in documents about supply chains, and wants to understand why.