Introduction
In this opinion piece, I argue that a sociology and anthropology of cure is accelerated
by various features of the scientific and social responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
I illustrate how the pandemic has made the general public rethink popular notions
of “cure,” foregrounded ethical dilemmas and inequalities in who has access to “cures”
and also revealed deep uncertainties correlated to a future where there is no such
thing as cure anymore. Such developments in the pandemic response illustrate the need
for a critical interdisciplinary agenda to interrogate the social, ethical, cultural,
economic, political and technological innovations of cures nationally and internationally.
The race for a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 illustrated the
urgency to find a cure during a pandemic but also deep anxieties, as the general public
realizes they have to leave behind absolutes of “cure” and deal with uncertainties
of who now gets cured? In medical sociological and anthropological literature, absolutes
of cure have long been criticized in research, amongst others, focusing on changing
ideas of: inequalities in who becomes incurable or curable, for example, during the
HIV/AIDS epidemic (Schoepf, 2001; Nguyen, 2010), inclusion in clinical trials (Petryna,
2009), or due to genomic advancements (Inhorn and Wentzell, 2012); environmental,
lifestyle and embodied (epigenetic) risks which have reconceptualised understandings
of nature and nurture (Kavanagh and Broom, 1998; Lock, 2013; Gale et al., 2016), as
“situated biologies” mean rethinking notion of bounded bodies in favor of how biology
is affected by environment (Niewöhner and Lock, 2018); expectations and hopes of new
biotechnologies and artificial intelligence that bring to the fore the way in which
scientific advancements can politically shape subjectivities, temporality, emotions
and care (Brown and Michael, 2003; Brown, 2005; van der Niet and Bleakley, 2020);
“promissory futures” of biomedical and scientific innovations, such as in the field
of regenerative medicine, become correlated to neoliberal policy-making and economic
investments (Brown et al., 2006; Selin, 2008; Morrison, 2012); novelty, for instance
in epigenetics, becomes socially constructed (Pickersgill, 2020); clinical forecasting
is relationally imbedded and negotiated in clinical practices (Timmermans and Stivers,
2018); and dealing with uncertainty of conditions with no cure, where instead experiments
become perilous options for patients (Fox, 2020). The above is just a sliver of the
breadth and depth of knowledge built on a continuum of cures, but the very notion
itself of “a cure” and how the concept is changing, is never explicitly questioned
as such.
Yet, as illustrated, just as comprehension of COVID-19 is marked by social understandings
of inequalities in infection, environment, prevention and intervention (Lupton and
Willis, 2020; Trout and Kleinman, 2020), knowledge of cure is socially and culturally
informed too. Public health pandemic responses to COVID-19 have focused on scaling
up disease prevention and control efforts, public health information, laboratory systems
and development of private and public partnerships to develop diagnostics, therapies,
antiretrovirals and vaccines. Furthermore, critical social commentaries have been
noted in terms of ethics of access to: care; life-saving equipment like ventilators;
therapies (e.g., remdesivir); vaccines; as well as debunking the idea of recovery
and immunity.
Presently, with hopeful vaccines on the horizon (Horton, 2020), a “critical bioethics
of cure” is developing, informed by differing ethical norms and values in society,
associated to who gets access to vaccines and how they will be allocated (see, Emanuel
et al., 2020). For example, in the United Kingdom (UK), the disability community has
warned of overt discrimination in lack of ethical inclusion in pandemic preparedness
and response (Armitage and Nellums, 2020), “ableism” (Campbell, 2009) of foregrounding
of able body in withholding, triage or rationing of care as cure, as well as warning
of “social” deaths in our disablist language use, and real deaths in revoking of rights
in health and social care policies (Abrams and Abbott, 2020; Tidball et al., 2020).
Disability studies researchers, while long critical of the medical model and curative
imperative (Clare, 2017), are pointing to an unethical “curation” or “social sorting”
(Grover and Piggott, 2010) in how the able body now gets protection against an infection,
access to critical care, therapies and vaccines (Scully, 2020), according to a new
curative “imperative of health” (Lupton, 1995) or distributed “logic” of cure (Mol,
2008). The logic of cure describes how an “imperative of cure” becomes normalized
in our social and cultural lives and is increasingly commodified but not distributed
equally nor a choice. Neoliberalism and promises of late modernity have been incorporated
in such a logic of cure, in terms of a “biopolitics of cure” in how patients, doctors,
researchers, pharmaceutical companies and financial investors create momentum around
specific infectious diseases, genetic disorders, chronic or neurological conditions
and now in its acceleration for the general population during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Rethinking Cure
COVID-19 elicits a variety of human immune responses (e.g., acute, chronic, mild,
and also uncertain recovery) that we do not yet understand, in both people who are
seemingly healthy or have pre-existing conditions. We know that that certain sections
of the population (e.g., linked to structural inequalities, ill-health, co-morbidities,
age, disabilities and biology) are at greater risk from COVID-19 (Bentley, 2020).
People who have COVID-19 can also be asymptomatic carriers (see Gandhi et al., 2020),
as well as possibly get reinfected after recovery, further complicating our ideas
of symptoms and signs, as well as clinical and social understandings of how the virus
spreads. While patients recover, it does not seem as if immunity is always long-term
or sustained, calling into question ideas like giving survivors “immunity passports”
(Andersson et al., 2020). Similarly, “vaccine certificates,” “identification cards”
or “vaccine passports,” which while clinically and practically useful, could open
up the door to legal, ethical, and social issues, such as discrimination of those
without vaccinations (Phelan, 2020).
Further complicating notions of immunity and long-term cure, is that COVID-19 also
has “impairment effects” (Thomas, 2007) in creation of impairments (e.g., organs),
affects senses (e.g., smell) and emotions (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder) with
physical and psycho-social long-term rehabilitative needs (Halpin et al., 2020; Mandal
et al., 2020). As such, Greenhalgh et al. (2020) have noted the emergence of patients
who have survived COVID-19 but whose clinical and mental health recovery is slow and
long, noting that these patients are termed “long haulers.” New “biosocial” categories
(Rabinow, 1996; Rose, 2009) of patients are thus emerging around social identities
of uncertain survivorship from COVID-19, as we discover more about how COVID-19 affects
people (Kingstone et al., 2020; Ladds et al., 2020; Miyake and Martin, 2020; Philip
et al., 2020).
While a sociology of diagnosis (Nettleton, 2006; Jutel, 2009) can be helpful to comprehend
patient needs for a medical diagnosis, people with long COVID-19 struggle with the
physical and mental health uncertainties of recovery and realization that there may
only be a partial survivorship or indeterminate forms of cure (see Ladds et al., 2020).
Similarly, there is no certain prognosis or forecasting that can be made about the
future of how recovery from COVID-19 survivorship will unfold alongside other conditions,
and this influences treatment options and experiences of primary care (Kingstone et
al., 2020). The current medical emphasis is still on comprehension of the embodiment
of curative processes and examining prognosis, treatment and responses to therapies,
rehabilitation, mental health support and how survivor experiences can become linked
to prevention efforts.
Attending to risks of COVID-19 and mitigating those through policies such as lockdowns,
means the indirect effects of who does not get access to diagnosis, therapies and
curative promises in the NHS and whose health and impairment is ignored, has been
neglected in research. As have the social realities of the thousands of people who
have been told to shield because they are severely clinically vulnerable. We do not
yet understand the psychological and social impacts on this population group of long-term
shielding and messages of “vulnerability” directed toward them. They and their loved
ones have had to deal with the idea that survivorship from COVID-19 may not be a possibility
for them, as well as having heightened levels of risk to negotiate. What has been
the physical and psychological impact of such heightened risk work of staying well?
There will also be people within this group that will survive COVID-19 but we don't
know if there is a continuum of mild, moderate and severe short or long-term effects,
nor if there are more curative possibilities that will be created in the future?
Promissory or Unequal Futures?
Promising candidate vaccines and research initiatives have raised local and global
public hopes and expectations of promissory futures (Brown et al., 2006) of living
COVID-19 free and returning to a normal life. However, these hopes have been tempered
by clinicians, academics, scientists, and philanthropists involved in pandemic efforts
noting the need for more long-term research about effectiveness of vaccines (Horton,
2020). For example, while the Pfizer/BioNTech, Sinovac and Moderna mRNA candidate
vaccines appear to offer initial effectiveness, results have yet to be published scientifically
and appraised by national regulatory bodies (Horton, 2020), although the UK has approved
the Pfizer vaccine. Similarly, while the Oxford/AstraZeneca candidate vaccine has
also reported high rates of efficacy, dose errors meant more testing was needed. In
addition, UK's Royal Society The DELVE Initiative (2020) have warned difficult medical,
political, ethical, economic, cultural, gendered and social questions remain about
vaccinations, such as equitable allocation and their long-term effectiveness.
The UK's policy responses have been steeped in self-interested nationalism, for instance,
by not engaging in European public-private partnerships or research platforms and
insisting on British development of UK vaccine (Sharpe et al., 2020). Likewise, the
UK's public health arguments and pandemic responses often emphasize individual civic
responsibilities for the common good (e.g., to get tested or vaccinated) rather than
broader structural arguments about “affordability, resource allocations and accountability”
that the government is responsible for (Forman and Kohler, 2020). Very little policy
attention has also been paid to the need to rebuild trust nationally and internationally
in government and health services, for instance, due to impact of COVID-19 on ethnic
minority communities and health care professionals, who are also most affected by
health inequalities, structural racism and history of medical mistreatment (Bentley,
2020). Surveys have reported that those most affected by COVID-19, are more likely
to report fears and less likely to want to be the first ones allocated to participate
in vaccination efforts (see Thorneloe et al., 2020). This also raises further questions
about accessibility of vaccines, if there will be multiple offers of vaccinations
and if people can choose if they want to be vaccinated or not, and with which vaccine?
What types of choices will people have? Will those be constrained by nationalism?
This remains to be seen as the Pfizer vaccination begins and the UK heralds itself
as being the first in the world to begin a mass vaccination campaign to protect against
COVID-19.
While taking part in scientific research and trials for vaccines has undoubtly opened
new transnational ideas of curative citizenship (Rose, 2009), in the sense of acting
for the common global good to find a cure, access to vaccines seems bound to citizenship
and not to ideas of social justice, racial equity or biological or social needs. This
is reinforced by therapeutic and vaccine hoarding that certain nations in the Global
North have been engaging in. For example, Trump trying to gain exclusive access to
a vaccine for the United States by buying up stocks for national interests (see Dyer,
2020), rather than fulfilling the potential and promises of collaborative academic
and private-public partnerships for global equity, solidarity and rights to health
(Forman and Kohler, 2020).
It's important to interrogate how this could have happened? While philanthropic organizations
such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust have been involved
in setting up collaborative research platforms for cures and setting curative agendas
for equity, the realities of pandemic preparedness mean that transnational partnerships
can be quashed for national interests. This points to the need to interrogate how
“cure” functions and for which political and economic interests. Philanthropic organizations
have also paid less attention to the possible ramifications of the narrow development
for cures without correlated investments in care and social equity. By way of illustration,
what is the point of developing a cure for a neglected tropical disease, if you can
still get seriously ill because the basics of healthcare are neglected (Berghs et
al., 2020). Are there barriers in ethically interrogating or calling into account
such inequalities in curative development? As such, this points to the importance
of questioning definitions of cures, trajectories of their development and by whom
curative agendas get set during pandemics.
A Research Agenda?
To critically interrogate who gets cured, I argue that a new interdisciplinary research
agenda is needed that builds on the theoretical tools that we have, to develop a medical
sociology and anthropology of cure. Kavanagh and Broom (1998) emphasized that if you
wanted to understand intersection between environmental and embodied risks, it was
important to work together with people at “risk” to formulate new languages for changed
norms and values, as well as approaches to novel environmental and socially embodied
understandings. Similarly, a bioethics of cure could be an empirical-ethical theory
that could develop from the experiential knowledge of patients with COVID-19 undergoing
diagnosis, therapies and experiencing differing forms of cure (Caron-Flinterman et
al., 2005) or undertaking differing forms of “curative labor” (Cooper and Waldby,
2014). Yet, we are all currently socially and culturally engaging with diverse materialities
of cure in various settings.
There is an emotional and physical “curative labor” involved in gaining expertise
on immunity or using techonologies to stay “well,” keeping others healthy and negotiating
curative risks of COVID-19 that we are all involved with. There are also people who
will be identified as having more potentialities or probabilities to be cured and
others that refuse cure. Likewise, many people are living in fear, shielding or bereaved
and dealing with loss of curative hope and inequalities of cures. In a sociological
sense, we have all gone through a biological disruption (Bury, 1982) and are dealing
with the reality of “no cure” which has profoundly altered our worlds.
Hacking (2006) stated that people would socially organize around new types of genetic
risks, but I argue that new forms of identity are emerging, not only in terms of pandemic
risks and cures but concerning novel immunotherapeutic and curative risks of anti-microbial
resistance, potentials and dashed hopes which are unsettling epistemologies and ontologies
of how we understand biology, identity, embodiment and environment. We have the tools
to socially frame this new world together with the people most affected, not only
for the next pandemic but also with respect to novel developments in cure. We have
to engage in interdisciplinary work with epidemiology, public health, science and
technology studies, economics, disability studies, psychology, politics, ethics, law
and so on, to understand the impact of the search, development, potentials and realities
of agendas for accelerated searches for cures and their impacts. We need to locate
“cure” in pandemic preparedness but also wider scientific debates and biomedical and
technological developments. What could “cure” now mean?
A New Sociology and Anthropology of Cure Should:
Investigate how conceptions of cure politically change during pandemic responses and
as a part of national and international agendas of technological innovation. Why does
methodological nationalism but also the harsh policing of national borders, for instance,
happen during acerated curative searches?;
Critically examine and question the local and global inequalities in who gains access
to care as cure and the (bio) ethical, social, financial, political, cultural and
historical decisions that underpin such access. For example, who is going to gain
first access to a vaccine globally and what are the underpinnings of such policy decisions?
What is curative nationalism?;
Understand the expectations, emotions, expertise and embodied experiences of what
it means to undergo cure as patient, make sense of limitations of cure and/or lack
of cure. For instance, how does it feel to survive COVID-19 and realize that recovery
may only be partial? What psychological care and social support is needed?;
Frame the local realities of cure against broader transnational activism and global
debates linked to research for cures by focusing on how biological data is interpreted
through kinship, gender, ethnicity and disability. What does it mean to be part of
an accelerated search for a cure, such as a patient in a vaccine trial, and how do
people understand their involvement and how their biological data will be used?;
Map what needs exist for patients and their families, with respect to understanding
new scientific developments linked to diagnostics, therapies, vaccines and cures.
What information is needed by families who undergo latest curative interventions,
such as gene editing or stem cell donations? How do they understand their curative
trajectory and identity post-cure? Does a biopolitics of cure develop?;
Chart what future impact a growing field of cures would have on health and social
care services for patients where treatments are not an option, as well as disability
activism and advocacy. How does cure become linked to time and notions of “normality”?
Does a focus on cure lead to ableism in society and increase the imperative of health?
Does this increase curative stigma?;
Understand the norms and values of scientific involvement in diagnosis, therapies
and vaccines for cures and if those are reflected by professionals working in development
and financing of cures. Does a research scientist view their work as “curing”? Is
that the same as the people who finance the cures or big philanthropic organizations?;
Learn what impacts cures have when viewed alongside existing inequalities that affect
patients in local and global contexts. Are there unintended impacts of cure? What
role does artificial intelligence have in development of cures for patients or identification
of patients who might need cures? How is accessibility to both testing for need of
cure and cure itself ensured ethically, in for example, personalized medicine?;
Investigate how information in a local perspective on cure connects to broader transnational
and transgenerational debates to explore the ethical, economic, political, legal and
historical implications of cures and searches for vaccines. Are new developments for
cures connected to previous histories and pandemics, for example, Ebola? How do people
make sense of those pasts in the present? Why don't we interrogate a logic of cure
the same way we do care?
Author Contributions
The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for
publication.
Conflict of Interest
The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial
or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.