Introduction

Abstract

Today claims relating to health are so common that distinguishing between rights and interests is harder and harder: definitions of health as the one provided by the World Health Organization legitimise the expectation of a continuous improvement in standards of care, access to treatment and measures of prevention. Moreover, with COVID-19 pandemic, health seems to gain the status of a supreme and unquestionable value. Here the hypotheses of a “Healthization of Law” is presented: it indicates both a kind of supremacy of Law on other spheres of society when health (public or individual) is at stake, and also the fact the Law is strongly conditioned by the emergence of health as the highest value to which all spheres of society must orient themselves. Then analysing the relationship between the structural conditions of world society and the semantics of health it is urgent than ever, in order to understand which kind of expectations and claims pandemic legitimised, and how the semantics of health (and wellbeing) describes social structure and its changes.

Keywords

• right to health
• covid-19 pandemic
• health claims