Abstract
With the advance of the COVID-19 pandemic, a technological race for vaccine development began. Several researches are under development in the world and four vaccine candidates are being tested in Brazil. In this article I discuss how racial and socially articulated sanitary, economic and political dispositifs configured Brazil as an epicenter of the pandemic and a vaccine “laboratory” in 2020. I analyze how this situation was positively absorbed as an international recognition of the country’s competences participating in the global pharmaceutical research market. I also reflect on how the involvement in such studies does not necessarily guarantee Brazilian population’s future access to the vaccines tested here, since these technologies are subject of current unequal commercial disputes, which tend to reinforce the conditions that contributed to lead the country to the health tragedy from which the solution to the pandemic is expected to emerge.
Keywords:
COVID-19; clinical trials; vaccines; necropolitics