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As Nichter’s comment suggests, our world is one of great health disparities and inequalities in health status, access, and treatment that closely mirror social disparities and prevailing structures of non-egalitarian social relationship. Because health is the foundation of civil society, it has tremendous impact on political stability. The heightened anxiety surrounding the 2003 SARS, 2009 “swine flu” (H1N1 influenza), and our current 2020–2021 COVID-19 pandemic scares represented global expressions of a fragile perceived susceptibility in our new and dangerous twenty-first century world. While certainly there are areas in which health has improved, such as access to clean water in some locales, improvements in sanitation in many places, and progress in antenatal care, all of which are reflected in declining rates of child mortality, as the World Health Organization (2008:6) observes, the progress that has been made in health in recent years has been deeply unequal, with convergence toward improved health in a large part of the world, but at the same time, with a considerable number of countries increasingly lagging behind or losing ground. Furthermore, there is now ample documentation of considerable and often growing health inequalities within countries.