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Gabriela Bortz Senior Researcher - Research Center for Transformation, School of Economics and Bussiness, Universidad Nacional de San Martin Argentina

• 03.04.2024-29.04.2024
  

  COVID-19 vaccines in Latin America: capabilities, imaginaries, and State making. Lessons from Argentina and Brazil

  General aim:
  Develop a cross-country comparative analysis of the coproduction of capacity building in- and delivery of COVID-19 vaccines, each nation’s sociotechnical imaginaries (rights and duties, visions of desirable futures and citizenship), and the coalitions built around the biopharma industry and policy-making in Argentina and Brazil. 
  Specific aims:
  _ Analyze capacity-building processes in both countries, particularly focusing on critical complementary market-enabling capabilities and interactions (in R&D and industrial manufacturing, but also in health and IP regulation, clinical testing, and health policy-making, among others).
  _ Identify and analyze the domestic coalitions built around the biopharma industry and policy-making, their international commitments, and patterns of accumulation within a center/semi-periphery dynamic on global health. 
  _ Explore the repertoires of legitimization for decision-making, including the visions of the State, desirable futures, and citizenship mobilized around them. 
  _ Build an integral framework, adequate to capture the specificities and global implications of the object (COVID-19 vaccines), bringing together tools from Science, Technology, and Society Studies, Innovation Economics, and Political Economy. 
  _ Explore the current role of expert advice in vaccines and the potentialities for more democratic and inclusive governance. 
  _ Develop inputs for policy-making in the crossover between STI, Health and Industrial policies, towards inclusive development and access.
   
  Outcomes:
  _ Writing a paper on the aforementioned cross-case comparative analysis. 
  _ Building a network on the political, social, ethical, and economic aspects of COVID-19 vaccines, vaccine and biopharma development, and manufacturing, bringing together scholars from the Global South and North, which may lead to ulterior projects on Science, Technology Capacities and Policies and the Political Economy of Health. 
  _ Developing key inputs for assessing and advising public policies in health, the health industry, and Science and Technology. 
  _ Deepen on the -seldomly followed- interconnections between STS, Innovation Economy, and Political Economy in Latin America, towards broader research scholarships to understand the current dynamics of knowledge, industry and politics in Health. 
  _ Ulteriorly, this will lead to a broader comparative analysis of comparative COVID-19 response in terms of vaccines through the networks established in the project “Innovation and Complementary Capabilities for Vaccines” (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK and the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Japan) (2021-2024), setting a framework to analyze the cases of other Global South countries such as India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. 
   
   
   

Gabriela Bortz is a National Science Council (CONICET) Researcher at the Research Center for Transformation, School of Economics and Business, Universidad Nacional de San Martin (CENIT-EEyN-UNSAM), and Adjunct Professor of STS at the Universidad Nacional de Hurlingham. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences (Universidad de Buenos Aires), an MA in Science, Technology, and Society Studies (Universidad Nacional de Quilmes), and a BA in Political Science (UBA). She was a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at the Harvard STS Program (2021) and Brocher Foundation Fellow (2024). Her research work explores the interaction between STI policies, instruments, imaginaries and the social use of S&T in biotechnology, STI governance, and the bioeconomy as a development model for the region.

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