"The Truth Is Not Known": Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy as a Failure of Biomedicine's Moral Legitimacy in Zambia

Abstract

Over the course of 2021, a series of chilling videos were shared widely across Zambian social media purporting to link Covid-19 vaccines with a global plot to reduce the world's population through the mass murder of Africans. Such videos are easily understood as conspiracy theories, and in a literal sense these videos certainly do aim to reveal a conspiracy: a conspiracy to murder Africans. But in popular usage, the category of the conspiracy theory too often implies that the very idea there might be a conspiracy is the result of a kind of primordial irrationality whose epistemological bases bear little or no serious consideration. In this piece, I do the opposite: taking seriously my Zambian friends and interlocutors as savvy consumers and analyzers of global information, I examine the different epistemological justifications that lead them and me to arrive at such different truth claims. Tabling for the purposes of this piece a discussion of the "truth of the matter," I suggest that our vastly different experiences of and stories about moral legitimacy form the basis for our different forms of epistemological justification and, therefore, for our different understandings of the conspiracy theory lurking behind the dissemination of Covid-19 vaccines.