Global Histories and Politics of Emergency Vaccines

Join the Essex South Asia Research Network and Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation for an insightful online seminar with Dr Dwaipayan Banerjee

Dwaipayan Banerjee is an Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at MIT. Banerjee's first monograph Enduring Cancer: Life, Death and Diagnosis in Delhi is an ethnography of cancer in India. Enduring Cancer presents the efforts of the urban poor in Delhi to carve out a livable life with cancer, as they negotiate an over-extended health system struggling to respond to the disease. He has also co-authored Hematologies: The Political Life of Blood in Indiawith Jacob Copeman. Banerjee's current research Decolonizing Science: Towards a Cosmopolitics of Art, Physics and Computing in 1950s India tracks scientific and aesthetic internationalisms in early postcolonial Bombay and Calcutta. His current research - Decolonising Science: Towards a Cosmopolitics of Art, Physics and Computing in 1950s India tracks scientific and aesthetic internationalisms in early postcolonial Bombay and Calcutta.

The hopeful promise and roll-out of Covid-19 vaccines comes attached with a series of difficult questions. Are vaccines a 'human right'? Should patents be enforced in a way that puts people in the global south behind the queue of those that live in the United States and Europe? And how much do we know anyway about the new technologies that went into making it? As the world struggles to manufacture the vaccine at volume, India and China have the capacity to scale up production to meet global needs. They did so during the HIV-AIDS pandemic, when global south governments led by Nelson Mandela fought big pharma for the right to manufacture and sell essential life-saving drugs. Can the same strategies be mobilised to deal with inequalities in the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine? This talk answers these questions of vaccine access through the lens of decolonisation and offers key takeaways about what history teaches us about the possibilities and limits of vaccine equity.

 This seminar is an online open seminar series, hosted by the Essex South Asian Research Network (ESARN) and Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation