A Drama in Three Acts. Policy Experimentation During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Argentina

Producción CyT

Capítulo de Libro

Autoría

Gabriela Bortz ; SEIJO, GUSTAVO LUIS ; Maria Cecilia Sanmartin

Fecha

2025

Editorial y Lugar de Edición

Edward Elgar

Libro

Handbook of Living Labs and Real World Experiments
Edward Elgar

ISBN

978-631-00-3417-1

Resumen Información suministrada por el agente en SIGEVA

This chapter examines Argentina’s COVID-19 vaccine procurement process, focusing on public policy experiments to address vaccine scarcity in late 2020 and 2021. As vaccines became the pandemic’s “holy grail,” their concentration in high-income countries, coupled with fragile healthcare systems and deep inequalities, disproportionately affected developing nations, especially in Latin America. In Argentina, amidst high poverty, inflation, political polarization, and public... This chapter examines Argentina’s COVID-19 vaccine procurement process, focusing on public policy experiments to address vaccine scarcity in late 2020 and 2021. As vaccines became the pandemic’s “holy grail,” their concentration in high-income countries, coupled with fragile healthcare systems and deep inequalities, disproportionately affected developing nations, especially in Latin America. In Argentina, amidst high poverty, inflation, political polarization, and public mistrust, immunization was crucial to restoring order, as the government grappled with rising death tolls and the urgent need for socio-economic recovery in a country where health is enshrined as a constitutional right.The chapter reconstructs Argentina’s response through three critical “acts” of public experimentation, portraying a “muddling through” adaptive approach to overcoming vaccine scarcity. Amidst the global socio-technical experiment of combating COVID-19, it explores how pandemic responses collided with national constraints, creating “experimentation within the experimentation”. This trajectory reassembles notions of trust, rights, and citizenship under a pandemic-induced state of exception and structural international subordination. Grounded in scarcity and subordination as a central issue, the chapter contributes to STS literature from a Latin American perspective, highlighting how policy experimentation intersects with informal institutions and unstable material conditions, challenging global hierarchies in knowledge and political order

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Palabras Clave

policy experimentsLatin AmericaCOVID-19 vaccinestechnology governancescience and democracy