Sarah Snyder, Brother’s Brother Foundation in Costa Rica: A Case Study in Public-Private Partnerships and Global Health in the American Century
SIS Professor Sarah Snyder's new bookٱ Public Health and the American State analyzes a 1967 immunization campaign led by Dr. Robert Hingson and the nongovernmental organization (NGO) he founded, Brother’s Brother Foundation, that was aided by key logistical support from the United States government. This collaborative effort to promote public health and eradicate disease reveals one of the diverse ways the U.S. government improved public health and fought disease in the American century. This program achieved a degree of "soft power" for the United States, and it intersects with broader narratives about the role of the United States, American NGOs, and U.S. citizens in advancing international health.
Examining the episode illuminates American approaches to development in the 1960s, and it highlights an understudied bilateral relationship – that between the United States and Costa Rica, or the hawk and the sparrow, as one author has termed it. Finally, the campaign offers us a means of analyzing public-private global health collaboration in foreign countries.
“Brother’s Brother Foundation in Costa Rica: A Case Study in Public-Private Partnerships and Global Health in the American Century,” in eds. Gaetano Di Tommaso, Dario Fazzi, Giles Scott-Smith, (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).