COSMOETHICS AND COVID-19 VACCINES: BEYOND THE COSMOPOLITICAL PROPOSAL

Abstract

Management of the COVID-19 pandemic by Western countries is one of the most controversial topics in social studies today. One of the central concepts for analysing the organisation of pandemic management is that of Cosmopolitics, as it allows us to broaden the understanding of politics to include citizens, non-human living beings, terrestrial elements and SARS-CoV-2 itself. But as we argue in this article, cosmopolitics needs prior power, a generative potentia that emanates from the arrangement of the aforementioned actors. Based on the example of the months when the COVID-19 vaccine was developed and started to be inoculated, we will illustrate the cosmoethical proposal: an affirmative ethic that tinges and permeates arrangement of the actors who enact the vaccine, allowing its deployment for a later cosmopolitical opportunity. In this way, we conclude that pandemic management not only needs to pay attention to non-expert citizens or non-human actors, but also must tend to the energence of new realities, times and spaces.