Immunizing Argentina. COVID-19 vaccines, imaginaries and State building

SANMARTIN CECILIA; BORTZ GABRIELA

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 27th IPSA World Congress of Political Science; 2023

International Political Science Association

On March 19, 2020, the Argentinian Government declared COVID-19 a national health emergency through Decree 297/2020. The global pandemic posed a significant challenge to all countries in safeguarding the well-being of their populations. However, this challenge was particularly acute in developing nations like Argentina, where limited resources and glaring inequalities exacerbated the situation (1,2). In Argentina, the right to access healthcare is enshrined as a constitutional right (National Constitution, Art. 42), and health products are regarded as social goods (3). Consequently, the performance of the State came under intense scrutiny and triggered widespread citizen debate. Diagnostic reagents, face masks, and, most notably, vaccines emerged as political technologies, incorporating the nation's ideals into their design and serving as symbolic representations of the government's capacity to combat COVID-19 (4,5).How state (government and S&T) and private sector representations (imaginaries, roles, expectations) and capacities were mobilized to address the COVID-19 pandemic? In this article we attempt to respond to this enquiry reconstructing the trajectory of COVID-19 vaccines in Argentina. We explore how these political artifacts, resulting from diverse coalitions of actors, interests and material elements -and shaping this coalitions in turn- embedded a set of “techno-scientific promises” (29) related to diverse forms imaginaries on the nation, appreciations of “public good”, and desirable futures, attainable through S&T and its societal role (28). Drawing from the co-productionist stream of Science, Technology and Society studies, we explore COVID-19 vaccines as political artifacts, embedding political visions in their design (4) and resulting of political struggles and choices (5). Through these set of artifacts, we aim to analyze the co-production between S&T and Staten or, in other words, between knowledge-making, sense-making, governance practices, and the different culturally situated ways of representing the world (25,28). This exploratory paper, resorts to a systematic revision of journalistic articles published between March 2020 and August 2022, focused on the debates about COVID-19 vaccines, and to 8 interviews to key actors (January-July 2023).