Short abstract:

This paper argues that the categorical divisions that underpin modernity are operationalised in difficult conversations about vaccines, often to deleterious effect. Through attending to vaccines explicitly as objects, I argue that these divisions can be re-thought and (hopefully) overcome.

Long abstract:

Whilst Kirkland asks what would happen if we consider vaccines 'political from the start' (2016, p.x), I am interested in interrogating the mechanisms by which their purported separation from politics is sustained. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Dublin, Ireland from 2019-2022 (split in half by the COVID-19 pandemic), I examine the ways in which this division between vaccines and politics are operationalised in the everyday lives of my participants in public health and local communities and vaccine sceptics observed at rallies, public online spaces and wider secondary sources. The challenges of expressing doubt, anxiety or scepticism - which might be described as 'vaccine hesitancy' - draw out the depth of what Latour might describe the 'strength' or 'unassailability' of vaccines. I move that this strength can be conceptualised as resting on a series of a-priori categorical separations (politics / science, facts / values, nature / culture, technology / society), deeply rooted in modernist ontologies and mobilised at scale in the present, past and future of vaccines. This is particularly notable given the strength of condemnation expressed in labels used to describe seeming ‘anti-vaxxers’ -‘reality denial’, ‘science denier’ and even ‘child-murderers’. These moral, epistemological, political and even ontological divisions may seem insurmountable and deeply painful, causing distress to families who worry they’ve ‘lost’ loved ones over disputes about vaccination. STS and anthropological approaches propose to translate these at once real and conceptual distinctions into new ontological terrain which opens new possibilities for understanding emerging situations around vaccines.