Felix Stein

• Stein, Felix & Mcneill, Desmond James (2025). Blended finance to the rescue? Subsidies, vaccine bonds and matching funds in global health. Global Public Health. ISSN 1744-1692. 20(1). doi: 10.1080/17441692.2025.2468338. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  To close persistent global health financing gaps, policymakers have in recent years promoted the idea of ‘blended finance’, i.e. the strategic use of public funds to attract additional private sector investment. To better understand this trend, this paper studies three major blended finance instruments, namely vaccine bonds, advanced market commitments, and matching funds. In doing so, this paper makes two important contributions. On a practical level, it shows that these three blended finance instruments tend to be expensive and of questionable effectiveness. Their high costs favour large corporate actors, private investors and middlemen, while their benefits for potential beneficiaries in low- and middle-income countries and for public donors remain unclear. On a theoretical level, the paper asks why these instruments remain popular in policy circles despite their shortcomings. It finds that blended finance mechanisms proliferate thanks to their seemingly innovative nature, a constant emphasis on urgency or crisis, and the promise of combining market-based self-interest with positive social impact. The paper ends on a call for much greater critical scrutiny concerning blended financing mechanisms.

• Stein, Felix; Storeng, Katerini & Puyvallée, Antoine de Bengy (2022). Global health nonsense. The BMJ. 379. doi: 10.1136/bmj.o2932. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Spin, hyperbole, meaningless buzzwords, and technocratic jargon have become increasingly common in global health discourse. They are part of a broader phenomenon labelled “global health nonsense” Three main forms of global health nonsense are obfuscation, misrepresentation, and omission of relevant information Global health nonsense must be called out, because it stifles collective efforts to understand, critically assess, and improve global health governance

• Storeng, Katerini Tagmatarchi; Puyvallée, Antoine de Bengy & Stein, Felix (2021). COVAX and the rise of the ‘super public private partnership’ for global health. Global Public Health. ISSN 1744-1692. doi: 10.1080/17441692.2021.1987502. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  COVAX, the vaccines pillar of the Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A), has been promoted as ‘the only global solution' to vaccine equity and ending the Covid-19 pandemic. ACT-A and COVAX build on the public-private partnership (PPP) model that dominates global health governance, but take it to a new level, constituting an experimental form that we call the ‘super-PPP'. Based on an analysis of COVAX's governance structure and its difficulties in achieving its aims, we identify several features of the super-PPP model. First, it aims to coordinate the fragmented global health field by bringing together existing PPPs in an extraordinarily complex Russian Matryoshka doll-like structure. Second, it attempts to scale up a governance model designed for donor-dependent countries to tackle a health crisis affecting the entire world, pitting it against the self-interest of its wealthiest government partners. Third, the super-PPP's structural complexity obscures the vast differences between constituent partners, giving pharmaceutical corporations substantial power and making public representation, transparency, and accountability elusive. As a super-PPP, COVAX reproduces and amplifies challenges associated with the established PPPs it incorporates. COVAX's limited success has sparked a crisis of legitimacy for the voluntary, charity-based partnership model in global health, raising questions about its future.

• Tichenor, Marlee; Winters, Janelle; Storeng, Katerini; Bump, Jesse B.; Gaudilliére, Jean-Paul & Gorsky, Martin [Vis alle 17 forfattere av denne artikkelen] (2021). Interrogating the World Bank’s role in global health knowledge production, governance, and finance. Globalization and Health. doi: 10.1186/s12992-021-00761-w. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Background In the nearly half century since it began lending for population projects, the World Bank has become one of the largest financiers of global health projects and programs, a powerful voice in shaping health agendas in global governance spaces, and a mass producer of evidentiary knowledge for its preferred global health interventions. How can social scientists interrogate the role of the World Bank in shaping ‘global health’ in the current era? Main body As a group of historians, social scientists, and public health officials with experience studying the effects of the institution’s investment in health, we identify three challenges to this research. First, a future research agenda requires recognizing that the Bank is not a monolith, but rather has distinct inter-organizational groups that have shaped investment and discourse in complicated, and sometimes contradictory, ways. Second, we must consider how its influence on health policy and investment has changed significantly over time. Third, we must analyze its modes of engagement with other institutions within the global health landscape, and with the private sector. The unique relationships between Bank entities and countries that shape health policy, and the Bank’s position as a center of research, permit it to have a formative influence on health economics as applied to international development. Addressing these challenges, we propose a future research agenda for the Bank’s influence on global health through three overlapping objects of and domains for study: knowledge-based (shaping health policy knowledge), governance-based (shaping health governance), and finance-based (shaping health financing). We provide a review of case studies in each of these categories to inform this research agenda. Conclusions As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage, and as state and non-state actors work to build more inclusive and robust health systems around the world, it is more important than ever to consider how to best document and analyze the impacts of Bank’s financial and technical investments in the Global South.

• Stein, Felix (2021). Risky business: COVAX and the financialization of global vaccine equity. Globalization and Health. doi: 10.1186/s12992-021-00763-8. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Background During the first year and a half of the COVID-19 pandemic, COVAX has been the world’s most prominent effort to ensure equitable access to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. Launched as part of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (Act-A) in June 2020, COVAX suggested to serve as a vaccine buyers’ and distribution club for countries around the world. It also aimed to support the pharmaceutical industry in speeding up and broadening vaccine development. While COVAX has recently come under critique for failing to bring about global vaccine equity, influential politicians and public health advocates insist that future iterations of it will improve pandemic preparedness. So far COVAX’s role in the ongoing financialization of global health, i.e. in the rise of financial concepts, motives, practices and institutions has not been analyzed. Methods This article describes and critically assesses COVAX’s financial logics, i.e. the concepts, arguments and financing flows on which COVAX relies. It is based on a review of over 109 COVAX related reports, ten in-depth interviews with global health experts working either in or with COVAX, as well as participant observation in 18 webinars and online meetings concerned with global pandemic financing, between September 2020 and August 2021. Results The article finds that COVAX expands the scale and scope of financial instruments in global health governance, and that this is done by conflating different understandings of risk. Specifically, COVAX conflates public health risk and corporate financial risk, leading it to privilege concerns of pharmaceutical companies over those of most participating countries – especially low and lower-middle income countries (LICs and LMICs). COVAX thus drives the financialization of global health and ends up constituting a risk itself - that of perpetuating the downsides of financialization (e.g. heightened inequality, secrecy, complexity in governance, an ineffective and slow use of aid), whilst insufficiently realising its potential benefits (pandemic risk reduction, increased public access to emergency funding, indirect price control over essential goods and services). Conclusion Future iterations of vaccine buyers’ and distribution clubs as well as public vaccine development efforts should work towards reducing all aspects of public health risk rather than privileging its corporate financial aspects. This will include reassessing the interplay of aid and corporate subsidies in global health.

• Stein, Felix (2020). Blinded by the slide show: Ignorance and the commodification of expertise. Critique of Anthropology. ISSN 0308-275X. 40(4). Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

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• Stein, Felix (2024). Innovative financing for pandemic preparedness. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Stein, Felix (2024). Interview with Nathalie Rhodes and Emma Elson at the UK governments Foreign Commonwealth & Dev Office (FCDO). [Journal]. Foreign Commonwealth & Dev Office (FCDO). Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Stein, Felix (2023). Financial innovation for pandemic preparedness. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Time, Jon Kåre; Storeng, Katerini; Puyvallée, Antoine de Bengy & Stein, Felix (2023). En pandemi av bullshit. [Journal]. Morgenbladet. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Stein, Felix (2023). McNeill, Desmond. Fetishism and the theory of value: reassessing Marx in the 21st century. xix, 322 pp., bibliogr. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. £79.50 (ebook). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. ISSN 1359-0987. doi: 10.1111/1467-9655.13894. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Time, Jon Kåre; Stein, Felix; Storeng, Katerini & Puyvallée, Antoine de Bengy (2023). Pølsevev, nonsense eller bullshit – kall det hva du vil. Nå har helseforskere fått nok. [Journal]. Morgenbladet. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Stein, Felix (2022). False beginnings and false endings in Haiti’s Cholera Epidemic. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Stein, Felix (2022). Unsettling Finance? An Examination of Esg and Impact. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Stein, Felix (2021). False beginnings and false endings in Haiti’s Cholera Epidemic. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Stein, Felix (2021). Vaccine prices may become a political powder keg. The Loop. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Storeng, Katerini; Stein, Felix & Puyvallée, Antoine de Bengy (2021). COVAX and the many meanings of sharing. BMJ Global Health. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  The COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility (COVAX) has been promoted as the ‘only global solution’ to end the accute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. The notion of ‘sharing’ has been a central trope in policy debate about this ‘vaccine-sharing’ scheme. In the first eighteen months of the pandemic, COVAX has struggled to share the risks and benefits of vaccine development, wealthy countries’ excess vaccine doses, and the burden of financing COVAX and the wider Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A), of which it is part. In the global pandemic response, the term ‘sharing’ glosses various kinds of transactions, some of which jar with commonplace understandings of what it means ‘to share’. COVAX’s approach to vaccine sharing obscures what it does not share: decision-making power and the knowledge and technology to produce vaccines everywhere.

• Storeng, Katerini Tagmatarchi; Puyvallée, Antoine de Bengy & Stein, Felix (2021). GLOBVAC 2021, Symposium 3: Politics of Pandemic Preparedness. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Dolgin, Elie & Stein, Felix (2021). Omicron is supercharging the COVID vaccine booster debate. [Internet]. Nature. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Storeng, Katerini; Puyvallée, Antoine de Bengy & Stein, Felix (2021). Norge har gitt 4 milliarder til pandemisamarbeid nesten ingen forstår. [Journal]. Morgenbladet. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Stein, Felix (2021). Vaccine prices may become a political powder keg. [Journal]. The Loop blog. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

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