Marija Brujić

Who’s afraid of the pandemics? The health preparedness initiatives in Serbia

Marija Brujić

Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, University of Belgrade

marija.brujic@f.bg.ac.rs 

The COVID-19, or coronavirus pandemic, caused by the highly infectious SARS-CoV-2 virus, increased health-risk awareness on a global scale. The aim was to prevent similar health emergencies. Simultaneously, the pandemic traced a path for (other) health emergency preparedness initiatives. In this presentation, I discuss the experience of Serbia, a small non-EU post-socialist country, as a case study. I question how Serbia responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and what changes were implemented during this period. To answer this, I focus on one important aspect of health preparedness, namely vaccine production against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. My research draws on a wide range of sources, such as literature and media data reviews, supplemented with an analysis of an interview with the then director of the Institute of Virology, Vaccines and Sera “Torlak”. Therefore, the aim is to interpret local findings in a wider perspective – the possibility of “colonialisation” of small health care systems through implementation of Western and Eastern health initiatives against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Thus, at the beginning, I juxtapose the social actions (past and on-going achievements in the vaccination domain) of “Torlak” as the main state vaccine provider and producer in Serbia with the social actions of the Serbian government (narratives on their recent endeavors to establish a vaccine factory against Coronavirus). The Serbian case is interesting for several reasons: it was the third European country to start mass vaccination against the SARS-CoV-2 virus; it was one of the rare countries that procured Russian, Chinese, and Western vaccines, and third, two state initiatives for establishing two factories for domestic vaccine production eventually failed. In addition, to understand the position of contemporary Serbia, I apply the “temporality” theoretical approach as used in the anthropology of postsocialism. Moreover, I interpret my findings by using the concept of “human agency” as defined by Emirbayer and Mische (1998). Finally, I point out that health preparedness in Serbia is a product of its current socio-cultural and political-economic condition. Therefore, Serbian unsuccessful projects with COVID-19 vaccine production argue against universal possibilities of “health” colonialisation, at least in a country with an ineffectual transition out of socialism.

BIOGRAPHY

Marija Brujić is a senior research associate and an associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, where she teaches Anthropology of Migration (PhD level) and Anthropology of Material Culture (BA level). In addition to studying migration, her research interests include visual and medical anthropology and the anthropology of the EU. She received her MA and PhD from the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology at the University of Belgrade. In addition to this, she finished her MSc studies in visual anthropology at the University of Oxford. She was also a visiting student at the Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia, and a visiting scholar at the University of Graz, Austria (2013) and at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands (2020). She was a guest lecturer at the University of Oxford, Florida International University, and the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, she is a principal (co-)investigator of the Serbian-Austrian bilateral project “Migrants in Need? The Sociocultural Effects of Contemporary Crises on Serbian Migrants in Austria and Returnees in Serbia.”