Intercultural medical disagreements: Ebola vs. Covid-19

Suppose there is a public health measure which conflicts with local cultural ways of being, but which the relevant public health authority has the power to impose on the local population. When, if ever, does it have the right to do so? We argue that the right can only accrue when there has been a good negotiation. We stop short of offering a sufficient condition or full justification for a decision on the part of a public health authority to impose a measure on an unwilling population, but provide what we take to be an important necessary condition or prerequisite. We propose that this is a useful amendment of and extension to Medical Cosmopolitanism, an existing approach to intercultural medical disagreement and to "decolonizing medicine" (Broadbent, 2019).