More-than-national and less-than-global: The biochemical infrastructure of vaccine manufacturing

The recent efforts to mount an R&D response public health emergencies of international concern have led the formation what we term a biochemical infrastructure vaccine development and production. In principle, this is expected not only curtail existing pandemics but also anticipate contain yet-to-emerge future threats. Critically, by nature its geographical distribution technical modularity, that promises both accelerate expand access essential medical tools, in so doing, redress global inequities. practice, however, vaccines remains highly uneven, fragmented unjust. Moving beyond calls for ‘global solidarity’, paper examines key actors, normative techniques socio-technical assemblages, from viral platform technologies intellectual property waivers accelerated regulatory pathways advance market commitments, serve link ‘just-in-case’ ‘just-in-time’ modalities R&D. We argue biomedical production emerging wake COVID-19 pandemic unfolding across innovation ecosystem more-than-national yet less-than global: reconfiguration may offer possibilities new, radically-overhauled, model equity.