CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The development of vaccines against COVID-19 hasbrought about substantial changes in the progression of the pandemic that beganin November 2019. For the first time, imagining a post-pandemic future becomesfeasible. Many governments put vaccines in the foreground of a hopefuldiscourse, insofar as it looked as if the grave situation could finally beovercome. The long months of fear, uncertainty and lockdown would meet at lastthe long-desired outcome: recovery or, in the now familiar medical terms inwhich the notion of crisis was deployed, a return to normalcy, to a state ofhealth.This narrative, however, has quickly met its limits,since it looks unlikely that this long-anticipated future will take placeanytime soon. A huge global demand, difficult to meet in the short term andcomplex vaccination arrangements that must be designed, along with hoarding ofvaccines by the wealthiest countries that gives rise to serious problems ofprovision make this future fuzzy, prolonging the critical time of the pandemicand turning its end into something indefinite at the precise moment in which itseemed imminent.Argentina is not exempt, of course, from this globalscenario, but at the same time it becomes necessary to stress somepeculiarities. The country had its first COVID-19 cases in March 2020, in themidst of a grievous economic situation inherited from the four-year term ofpresident Mauricio Macri, with high levels of inflation, unemployment andpoverty and a heavily deteriorated and devalued health system. Faced with thisscenario, the new federal government implemented a quarantine that would lastfor several months - with the goal of strengthening health infrastructure - butone that eventually would be dismantled from below by the population itself,due at least in part to economic strains that have become impossible to bear.In consequence, a gradual and still ongoing opening of activities prompted thegovernment to react and accommodate to these new circumstances, under theargument of encouraging economic recovery. At the same time, it enterednegotiations with many of the different laboratories then developing vaccinesagainst COVID-19. One of these agreements involved the Gamaleya ResearchInstitute of Epidemiology and Microbiology (Russian Federation) and their Gam-COVID-Vacor Sputnik V, which enabled the beginning of the vaccination campaign by lastDecember. From that time onwards the government has devoted its every effort toincrease and accelerate this process, embedding it in a narrative of futurehope that implied a country free from death and disease and, at the same time,returning to "life as usual" and the path of economic recovery.It is well known that throughout the pandemic mostcountries combined stretches of time where COVID cases were on the rise withothers when they underwent a process of decrease. When everything looked as ifthe situation would finally die down and some sense of normalcy might return,everything seemed to return to square one, sometimes in a brief span of time.This alteration of "normalcy" and everything that it entails constitutes whatwe usually define as "crisis". A singular kind of temporal experience, everycrisis implies a break, a discontinuity with a preceding time and thesetting-up of a temporality that does not progress towards resolution; a timewhere the very idea of a future turns troublesome. However, the notion ofcrisis itself as transitional time does presuppose some kind of future asoutcome and closure of that "suspended" time. If the narratives around vaccination, as we havealready stated, propose a future scenario of hope that must be brought about tobring closure to the time of crisis, a successful fulfillment entails ashort-term temporal horizon, since otherwise cases will increase (and with themthe occupation of ICUs and correlated deaths) and with it the extension of thetime of crisis. In addition, the hopeful side of this discourse meets objectivelimits in the difficulties most countries encounter at the time of gainingaccess to an adequate amount of doses, especially in the case of those facingeconomic challenges akin to those of Argentina. Even when it is currently the countrywith the highest rate of vaccinated population in the whole region, anyoptimistic scenario depends on the laboratories delivering their doses in theright amounts and deadlines. On the other hand, and almost right from the verybeginning, the management of the pandemic became entangled in the heavypolitical polarization affecting the country, and from which the vaccinationprocess is not exempt. Far-ranging sections of the media and politicalopposition questioned in hard terms the use of the Sputnik V vaccine ("Russianvaccine") claiming in many cases the existence of alleged spurious deals,criticizing it in terms of lack of information and problems with transparencyor just plain rejecting it for its coming from a "communist regime", strivingto promote distrust in the general population.Therefore, the nature of the future is the result ofboth the outcome of available images capable of claiming more or less assentand the way in which social actors process every day and concrete experiencesin which the promises of the future are seen as being fulfilled or as slowlyunfolding in certain signs that make it look feasible. In this text, we intendto show how the future is configured through an active, ongoing and never-endingprocess ultimately dependent on the way social actors organize their everydayexperience. Through recourse to statements made by people residing in theMetropolitan Area of Buenos Aires and inhabitants of small and middle-sizedsettlements in the hinterland of the province, as well as materials from theanalysis of social networks and media sources we wish to reconstruct andanalyze the basis on which different futures may be predicated as feasible, theways in which they are continuously remade, reinforced or transformed and the waythey relate to one another on a general scenario in which different futurescoexist and enter into conflict at the same time.

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