Introduction Global Vaccine Logics

Medical anthropologists have long located their work at sites of illness, sickness, and disease, where people and their kin experience physical and highly emotional states of discomfort brought on by social, political, biological and environmental happenings. The collected papers in this Anthropologica thematic edition focus on how powerful global assemblages and political economies affect vaccine development, manufacture, regulation, and distribution in early twenty-first-century neoliberal technoscience and post-colonial cultures. This volume expands the social science scholarship on vaccines beyond ethnographic contributions to clinical studies of their pharmacological protective and therapeutic implications to reveal the global logics of vaccine making. As potential preventatives, vaccines offer the promise of holding at bay infectious diseases once as common as diphtheria, pertussis and measles, as deadly as smallpox and polio, as slowly emerging as cervical or liver cancer, and as globally threatening as Ebola, COVID-19 in recent memory, and Pathogen X, just around the corner. A jab carries a symbolic and material dispatch for preserving health; it can transform a prospective pathogenic assault into an unnoticeable insult. Those reduced insults undermine the usual signs, symptoms and outcomes of infectious disease in a variety of ways, including their ability to reduce the severity of a disease and its transmission or to prevent it entirely. Such actions became recognized worldwide during the COVID-19 epidemic, when the science of vaccine safety and efficacy and disease transmission before and after vaccination entered the common lexicon. Information about epidemics, as well as mis- and dis-information about vaccines, circulated everywhere across social media—taxi drivers, grocery store clerks and scientists alike could be overheard explaining the difference between smallpox’ eradication and polio’s elimination, discussing mRNA technology and aerosol transmission, and quarrelling about distancing, face masks and vaccine quality, efficacy, immunity, and safety. The success of both routine immunization and targeted campaigns during outbreaks made global vaccination a priority much earlier for the World Health Organization in their admirable aim of “health for all” worldwide. Experimental vaccines, however, quickly become silver bullets for local, national, and global biological and social entanglements that can be characterized by Singer’s term “syndemic,” where amplification of synergistically increasing social and biological harms and worsening health outcomes inequitably prey on the most vulnerable (Barrios et al. 2024; Singer 2009; Wallace et al. 2016). Speculations arise surrounding causation, transmission, and herd immunity at the boundaries of power, poverty, and racialized bodies. The COVID-19 pandemic reminded a world that had claimed triumph over infectious diseases that the term “vaccine” has historical, semantic, and geopolitical depth reproducing zones of political influence (Guilbaud and Sansonetti 2015; Moulin 1996). So too, with the billions of dollars invested in different biologic platforms, new vaccines and biotherapeutics for cancers and countless other infections, including HIV, are now racing along an adapted and agile regulatory development pipeline of innovative and highly commercializable biotechnologies at an unprecedented pace. Some anthropologists have turned their attention to behavioural-psychological dimensions of vaccine uptake to address vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccine movements (Larson 2020). We must remember, though, that there has been a long history of vaccine dissenters since the veterinarian Edward Jenner transformed the practice of variolation into a smallpox vaccine, having “discovered” the formidable principle of vaccination in the late eighteenth century that enabled Louis Pasteur and others to develop it into an elaborate technique for preventive medicine (Bailey 1996). The acceptance of vaccines has been a charged body politic worldwide since their inception, but across colonial and postcolonial African states, they are deeply entangled with the politics of body extraction, suspicion, distrust and anxieties that have been described by historians, anthropologists and political scientists in multiple studies (for example, …