Immunities in the COVID age: a sociomaterial and more-than-human perspective

Abstract

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the topic of human immunity has received intense attention in the scientific literature and public forums: often in contested, highly politicised and confusing ways. A plethora of terms involving immunity have appeared in news reports, government announcements and academic articles: herd immunity, hybrid immunity, immunity gap, immunity debt, immunity theft, immunity evasion, immunity escape and immunity wall. In this essay, I discuss the diverse discourses, logics, practices and biopolitics of contemporary representations and understandings related to immunities in the wake of this continuing crisis. Building on recent scientific ideas about the dynamic nature of personal immunity and engaging with more-than-human social theory, I argue for an alternative conceptual approach that recognises the complex dimensions and interdependencies of sociobiological immunity systems. From this perspective, human immunities are vibrant agential capacities that are both biographical, unique to the individual, and multiple, sited in and distributed across multi-species relations and social and biological conditions. This approach can help us move beyond the individualism, immunitary moralism and anthropocentrism that have pervaded immunitary mechanisms and discourses in the COVID age.