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AbstractMedical sociology and science and technology studies (STS) emerged from different positions, but often closely related concerns, within the broad discipline of sociology. Their interface and areas of overlap have mostly been shaped by theoretical positions broadly considered "social constructionist." Taken together, these perspectives provide empirical and theoretical tools to analyze important questions about how social inequalities, forms of scientific knowledge, and patterns of human health come to be produced and feedback into one another. Examining their intersection enables sociological questions such as: How is medical and public health scientific knowledge produced, stabilized, and taken as fact? How are scientific facts about health and illness used, experienced, and challenged? What is the relationship between health inequalities and public health or medical knowledge? This article seeks to briefly trace the important contributions that social constructionist research has made at the interstices of medical sociology and STS, further clarifying the history, points of intersection, and areas of diversion between them. The current COVID‐19 pandemic has unveiled the political struggles that constitute public health scientific knowledge and circulation. The interface between STS and medical sociology can help us to make sense of the interrelationships between politics, power inequalities, and public health scientific knowledge.

This article examines an attempt to reconstitute global development governance in a context of growing influence for private finance. We focus on the World Bank's Human Capital Project (HCP) and Human Capital Index (HCI), which have stated aims of promoting economic growth and accelerating progress towards achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Informed by a review of publicly available World Bank materials, we argue that, through its HCP and HCI, the World Bank is responding to its own institutional sidelining in development financing and governance with a strategy of reintermediation. Its leaders have pursued a system of governance in which the World Bank creates and instrumentalises knowledge on human capital – an asset to be accumulated through judicious investments in markets for self-betterment. Through its HCI the World Bank has expanded its global benchmarking practices, encompassing new domains and quantified predictions of future productivity, in the hope of shaping domestic policy processes. Its leaders propose to use HCI scores to signal risk to investors and political leaders, triggering political shocks that will spur policy reform. Crucially, these efforts seek to reassert the World Bank's epistemic authority and financing clout as the influence of its own lending wanes.

For the poorest of our world, non-communicable diseases and injuries (NCDIs) account for more than a third of their burden of disease; this burden includes almost 800000 deaths annually among those aged younger than 40 years, more than HIV, tuberculosis, and maternal deaths combined. • Despite already living in abject poverty, between 19 million and 50 million of the poorest billion spend a catastrophic amount of money each year in direct out-of-pocket costs on health care as a result of NCDIs. • Progressive implementation of affordable, cost-effective, and equitable NCDI interventions between 2020 and 2030 could save the lives of more than 4·6 million of the world's poorest, including 1·3 million who would otherwise die before the age of 40 years. • To avoid needless death and suffering, and to reduce the risk of catastrophic health spending, essential NCDI services must be financed through pooled, public resources, either from increased domestic funding or external funds. • National governments should set and adjust priorities based on the best available local data on NCDIs and the specific needs of the worst off. • International development assistance for health should be augmented and targeted to ensure that the poorest families affected by NCDIs are included in progress towards universal health care.