ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Stable and Static? Socialist Societies as Ideal Epidemiological Terrains After the End of Epidemics

• In Event: Epidemic and Illness in the Modern Era 1

English Abstract

Oral polio vaccine, developed in a collaboration between American and Eastern European virologists in the 1950s and used in the global polio eradication programme today comes with a paradox: this live virus vaccine is the only one capable eradicating the virus (Type 2 and 3 wild viruses have already disappeared as a result), but it is also the vaccine that in small numbers causes vaccine-derived polio that can circulate in populations (. The oral vaccine, therefore is the only one that can eradicate polio, but is also the only one that cannot make it disappear.

Research on Vaccine Acquired Paralytic Polio (VAPP) and circulating Vaccine Derived Poliovirus (cVDPV) became increasingly important as the polio eradication initiative took off in the 1980s, and particularly in what is called the ‘endgame’ of the campaign as the ever-elusive target of complete eradication appears on the horizon. One of the important sites for following the effects of vaccination after the end of epidemics have been state socialist countries, drawing on – perceived and real – strengths in surveillance, hierarchical public health organization and consistency in vaccination regimes. This paper starts out in the 2010s and through an inverted chronology arrives in the 1950s to explore the following questions: What is the scientific process of gaining information about the spread of a disease that is not a disease, after it has ended? How do assumptions about socialism figure into this process, after socialism? How does the political in scientific endeavour persist and disappear?

Author

• Dora Vargha, University of Exeter / Humboldt University