Standard Research Grant: Science and the Social Production of Crisis: Sagas of HIV/Blood Contamination

HIV contamination of the blood supply happened in all industrialized countries in the early 1980s. The scope of the consequent medical disaster in different nations was almost unimaginable in terms of the numbers infected and mortality. Different countries confronted the same scientific uncertainties on the etiology and course of the AIDS epidemic, and there was marked overlap in key actors (i.e. blood bankers, government health officials, legislators, militant hemophiliacs) and in the identification of institutional failures. Nevertheless, this occurrence never rose to the level of political crisis in some nations but did in others. The goal of this project is to understand how history, politics, science, medicine, and public health converge to transform health catastrophes into political crises in some social contexts but not others. A detailed comparison of countries with different responses to the same public health disaster offers a natural experiment to unravel the importance of ideology, institutional structures, and social movement organizations in politicizing or mitigating catastrophe. Public health disasters have become a fact of life in our globalized world, as have differential governmental and public responses to them. The recent COVID-19 pandemic is but one case in point. The project will produce a podcast and an exhibition for museums and libraries to educate the public about these issues.

This project is grounded in historical and archival research into previously inaccessible government documents, and in oral histories with major players in the AIDs epidemic. Across nations, the meanings of blood as a bodily fluid intrinsic to human dignity and personal integrity, as a marketable drug akin to aspirin or penicillin, or as a medical service like an organ transplant, and the organization of blood systems that institutionalize these meanings, were put in place at the end of the second world war. The differential evolution of these systems across nations over the decades since the war and of the starkly different ideologies surrounding them are key to understanding their different responses to HIV blood contamination. Such systemic differences lead to marked contrasts in interpretation and management of scientific uncertainties, in attributions of responsibility for scientific and/or public health mismanagement, and in strategies of mitigation. Overall, this project will contribute to our knowledge of the circumstances under which public health disasters are likely to also become political crises.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.