Short abstract:

Under what circumstances does the emergence of a new technology lead to the fading out of existing competing technologies, and how does this take place across different countries? The paper seeks to answer this question by examining the development of vaccine technologies over the last century.

Long abstract:

The recent pandemic has exposed the effect of deep-rooted inequalities in access to health care. Low- and middle-income countries received significantly fewer doses of vaccines than their high-income counterparts. Typically, policy makers attribute the problem of vaccine inequality to matters of distribution, isolating it from linked processes of creation, production, and regulation. The proposed paper is an attempt to address this problem by examining the socio-technological relationships underlying vaccine innovation. The underlying hypothesis is that technological gaps between countries create distribution inequality, and this gap is largely a function of economic, legal, and political processes in a given space and time. Historically, technological progress in various fields is associated with a simultaneous fading out of ‘old’ technologies. Popular discourses explain these interrelated phenomena as a function of scientific advancement and technological determinism. The proposed paper problematizes such historically linear, technologically deterministic explanations and attempts to provide a critical understanding of technological progress and the concomitant obsoleteness. This approach examines the questions of why and how certain technologies become relevant in a given space and time by attending not only to the technological features which shape their interactions with the world but also to the underlying social conditions which determine their form and function.