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Precision medicine (PM) is emerging as a scientific bandwagon within the contemporary biomedical sciences in the United States. PM brings together concepts and tools from genomics and bioinformatics to develop better diagnostics and therapies based on individualized information. Developing countries like China and Brazil have also begun pursuing PM projects, motivated by a desire to claim genomic sovereignty over its population. In spite of commonalities, institutional arrangements produced by the history of genomics research in China and Brazil are ushering PM along different trajectories. In the Chinese case, we identify a strong state-backed push for PM combined with a dynamic network of international academic and private actors along the lines of networked technonationalism that has made large-scale, speculative PM projects possible. The Brazilian case is characterized by an institutional void at the federal level in which PM is driven by domestic academic actors in universities in the regional level, resulting in smaller scale, needs-driven PM projects. Through these cases, this paper shows how a scientific bandwagon adapts to national histories and institutions. Through this peripheral translation of the scientific bandwagon, the global infrastructure of biomedical knowledge has the potential to be transformed.

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During the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, experts and policymakers mobilised various slogans to compel the public to help defeat COVID-19. By comparing Brazil, the United Kingdom and the United States, this study shows how dominant sociotechnical imaginaries tied to the slogans were mobilised. We argue that the blind spots of these dominant sociotechnical imaginaries contributed to subversive sociotechnical imaginaries and made room for COVID-19 scepticism. In Brazil, calls to ‘take care of yourself’ contributed to a sceptical stance that individualised responsibility. In the United Kingdom, calls to ‘protect the NHS’ contributed to sceptical accusations of whataboutism and the neglect of other vital social institutions during the lockdown. In the United States, calls to ‘flatten the curve’ contributed to scepticism that challenged public health interventions through discourses of individual choice and freedom. By paying attention to the blind spots of dominant sociotechnical imaginaries, we argue that experts and policymakers should be sensitive to how public health messaging may have feedback effects that detract from the initial aims of interventions.

We trace the crafting of expert narratives during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and the United States. By expert narratives, we refer to how experts drew different lessons from past disease experiences in order to guide policymakers and the public amidst uncertainty. These expert narratives were mobilized in different sociopolitical contexts, resulting in varying configurations of expertise networks and allies that helped contain and mitigate COVID-19. In Mainland China, experts carefully advanced a managed narrative, emphasizing the new pandemic akin to the 2003 SARS outbreak can be managed while destressing the similar mistakes the government made during the two crises. In Hong Kong, experts invoked a distrust narrative, pointing to a potential coverup of COVID-19 similar to SARS, activating allies in civil society to pressure policymakers to act. In the United States, experts were mired in a contested narrative and COVID-19 was compared to different diseases; varying interpretations of COVID-19's consequences were exacerbated by political polarization. In expert narratives, the resonance of the past is emergent: the past becomes a site of struggle and a cultural object that is presented as potentially useful in solving problems of the present.