Paper short abstract:

Faced with catastrophe, Authority might actually reinforce it by promoting unsustainable interventions in the pursuit of human salvation. Among critics of these interventions, however, we find everyday gestures of care that could pave the way for more sustainable ecologies of health.

Paper long abstract:

Humanity is in danger, threatened by increasing climatic disruptions and recurrent epidemics. Never before has Authority been vested with a greater task than to provide the knowledges and technologies necessary to save us, nor has Humanity ever had bestowed upon it a greater duty than to submit to them, in order to be saved. Thus far, Authority's responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have been conceived within a paradigm that boosts biomedical research and industry, while prescribing behavioural norms, biomedical devices, medicines and above all, vaccination, all of which, in their gradual enforcement, are coming to be framed as a compulsory war against disease. At the same time, those who are cautious, critical or overtly opposed to vaccination are being criminalised, as 'anti-vaxxers'. However, in my fieldwork in Spain and Germany, I could find no common denominator to define them, primarily because they are not so much against vaccination as in favour of everyday minor gestures of care for their own and their relatives' ecologies of health. Beyond the entrenched discussions of the pros and cons of vaccination, these gestures of care highlight a more pressing concern. For alongside and at the limits of Authority's conceptions of health, self and life itself run flows of knowledge and materials, pertaining to biomedical research, industry and public health policy, which, far from delivering the promised salvation, appear to aggravate unsustainable ways of living.