Department seminar: Katerini T. Storeng
The Department of Social Anthropology is happy to announce the upcoming seminar with Associate Professor Katerini T. Storeng (UiO). The title of the lecture is "The many meanings of ‘sharing’ within the global vaccine-sharing scheme COVAX".
Main content
Seminar paper
The notion of ‘sharing’ is central in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, a crisis affecting the whole of humanity demanding a collective, global response. Nowhere has the notion of ‘sharing’ been more effectively used than in the global ‘vaccine-sharing’ scheme COVAX, which has been promoted as ‘the only global solution' to vaccine equity and ending the Covid-19 pandemic.
In this seminar, I will describe how COVAX has struggled to share the risks and benefits vaccine development; to share wealthy countries’ excess vaccine doses with countries lacking access, and to share the burden of financing COVAX and the wider Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A).
The term ‘sharing’, as deployed in the global pandemic response, glosses a range of transactions like ‘‘donating,’ ‘transferring’, ‘swapping,’ and ‘redistributing,’ some of which, like ‘re-selling’, are market-based. These uses of the notion of ‘sharing’ jar with anthropological understandings and everyday uses of the concept of sharing. Ultimately, COVAX’s approach to vaccine sharing obscures what it does not share: decision-making power and the knowledge and technology to produce vaccines everywhere.
The seminar will draw on a commentary that is forthcoming in BMJ Global Health, co-authored with Felix Stein and Antoine de Bengy Puyvallée. It is based on our collaborative research conducted within the project Public-private partnerships in Norway’s pandemic preparedness and response, funded by the Research Council of Norway.
About the lecturer
Katerini T. Storeng is Associate Professor at Centre for Development and Environment, University of Oslo. Read more about her here.