Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, research has explored various aspects of face mask use. While most of the research explores their effectiveness to prevent the spread of the virus, a growing body of literature has found that using face masks also has social meaning. But what social meaning does it have, and how does this meaning express itself in people's practice? Based on 413 qualitative interviews with residents in five European countries (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, and Switzerland), we found that the meanings of face masks have changed drastically during the first months of the pandemic. While in spring 2020 people wearing them had to fear stigmatization, in autumn of 2020 not wearing masks was more likely to be stigmatized. Throughout the first year of the pandemic, we found that mask wearing had multiple and partly seemingly contradictory meanings for people. They were perceived as obstacles for non-verbal communication, but also a way to affirm friendships and maintain social contacts. They also signaled specific moral or political stances on the side of face mask wearers and non-wearers alike, expressed their belonging to certain communities, or articulated concern. In sum, our findings show how face masks serve as scripts for people to navigate their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. We conclude that public and political discussions concerning face masks should include not only evidence on the epidemiological and infectiological effects of face masks, but also on their social meanings and their social effects.
Vaccine uptake is essential to managing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and vaccine hesitancy is a persistent concern. At the same time, both decision-makers and the general population have high hopes for COVID-19 vaccination. Drawing from qualitative interview data collected in October 2020 as part of the pan-European SolPan study, this study explores early and anticipatory expectations, hopes and fears regarding COVID-19 vaccination across seven European countries. We find that stances towards COVID-19 vaccines were shaped by personal lived experiences, but participants also aligned personal and communal interests in their considerations. Trust, particularly in expert institutions, was an important prerequisite for vaccine acceptance, but participants also expressed doubts about the rapid vaccine development process. Our findings emphasise the need to move beyond the study of factors driving vaccine hesitancy, and instead to focus on how people personally perceive vaccination in their particular social and political context.
Biomedical data, both in ‘traditional’, analogue forms as well as in the form of digital, ‘big’ data, are contingent social products. They reflect the categories and practices that structure our societies. We illustrate this by discussing gender biases in data stemming from clinical trials and electronic health records (EHR) and consider how biomedical data are prone to bias in different phases of data work, from data capture and representation to category building and analysis to using outputs. We argue that developments such as ‘Personalised’ and ‘Precision Medicine’ that have been made possible by ‘big data’ analyses could be seen as a shift away from the male ‘standard patient’ by trying to comprehensively and objectively represent many different aspects of patients' lives and bodies. At the same time, the very promises of comprehensiveness and objectivity are problematic: The data generated and collected, as well as the infrastructures and analytic tools used to do this, reflect the social realities – including the injustices and inequities – within which they were developed. The knowledge created on the basis of this ‘evidence’ can thus perpetuate existing biases. While we do not subscribe to a view of the world that considers truly objective, neutral, and – in this sense – ‘unbiased’ knowledge possible or even desirable, we suggest a number of ways in which gender bias in biomedical data should be made visible, reflected upon, and in certain instances acted upon.
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