Collective Care Amid US Individualism Through COVID-19 Vaccine Trial Participation

ABSTRACT

We analyze interviews with participants in a COVID-19 vaccine trial to show how Americans navigate conflicting discourses of individual rights and collective responsibility by using individual health behavior to care for others. We argue that interviewees drew on ideologies of “collective biology” – understanding themselves as parts of bio-socially interrelated groups affected by any member’s behavior – to hope their participation would aid collectives cohering around kinship, sex, age, race and ethnicity. Benefits (protecting family, representing one’s group in vaccine development and modeling vaccine acceptance) existed alongside drawbacks (strife, reifying groups), to illustrate the ambivalence of caregiving amid inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• vaccine
• individualism
• responsibilization
• care
• medical research

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the participants who kindly volunteered to be interviewed. We thank trial PI Dr. Patricia Winkour for providing access, and Michelle Rodenburg and the trial staff for their assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the University of Iowa Arts and Humanities Initiative.

Notes on contributors

Emily Wentzell

Emily Wentzell is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa. She uses approaches from medical anthropology, gender/sexuality studies, and science and technology studies to investigate how patients and providers experience emerging health interventions amid societal change.

Ana-Monica Racila

Ana-Monica Racila is a postdoctoral research fellow and medical anthropologist at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. Their research foci include infectious disease prevention and LGBTQ healthcare delivery.