RAHUL ADVANI In April and May 2021, the deadly second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India, driven largely by the delta variant, saw the country’s collapsing healthcare system make international news headlines. While images of bodies being burned in makeshift funeral pyres glowed from television screens, desperate pleas for hospital beds and oxygen cylinders…
Tag: vaccine
“Not the Chinese, I’m a Pfizer girl!” The covert politics of pharmaceutical branding in Covid struck Hungary
ARIEL BINETH HUNGARY. The country has one of the highest death rates of COVID-19 globally.1 Hospitals are filled with ICU patients at some places outnumbering staff 5:1.2 Nurses and doctors struggle with physical burnout, infrastructural breakdown, and government crackdown. The shadow of Prime Minister Viktor Orban floats above the pandemic by obstructing statistical transparency and…
Vaccine envy and vaccine snobbery – why we look a gift horse in the mouth when it comes to the Covid-19 vaccine
MARIA LARRAIN The vaccine rollout has been well-underway in the UK since Margaret Keenan was the first person in the world to receive the Pfizer Covid-19 jab in December 2020, a week before her 91st birthday. It marked the start of what Health Secretary Matt Hancock called “the fightback against our common enemy, the coronavirus”….
Between Jab Lines and Pandemic Orientalism in Urban Sri Lanka
VICHITRA GODAMUNNE & RAPTI SIRIWARDANE-DE ZOYSA The global COVID-19 vaccination drive has been steeped in geopolitical rivalries, captured not in the least within mainstream Euro-American media narratives. Coverage of the vaccine efforts in the so-called “Global South” has been replete with orientalised visions of these countries where the same international media-predicted pandemic disorder that did…
Vaccinating vaccines: Ethnography and the info-politics of public health
DAN ARTUS What exactly can an ethnography of vaccination hope to achieve? And how could one be undertaken? Although any given individual is likely to have received multiple vaccines throughout their lifetime, the act of administering one is typically extremely quick via injection, oral drops or even a nasal spray. Moreover, it occurs in specific…
The (Anthropological) Vaccine Rush
BEN KASSTAN It would be an understatement to say I rushed to the Jerusalem Arena stadium to receive the COVID-19 vaccination last week. Rolling down my sleeve after the jab, I felt as if I’d been marked with privilege while very conscious of the entrenched global public health inequalities that prevent the same timely access…
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS – Vaccines in View: Social Science Perspectives on COVID-19 Vaccinations
Incorporating pandemic public health, social inequalities, geopolitics, conspiracies and beyond, COVID-19 vaccines find themselves at the centre of the most significant debates of our time. As anthropologists and social scientists we have important voices that need to be heard on this matter, and are once again placed in the unique position of watching noteworthy global…