Mollie Holmberg

In the wake of emergencies such as the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation (CEPI) has emerged as a new partnership between governments, private foundations, international finance, and pharmaceutical companies geared at financing vaccines for emerging infectious diseases before outbreak happens. Previous efforts at stimulating or mending vaccine markets have so far failed to achieve this. Studying why CEPI’s new strategies for financing vaccine development succeed (or don’t) and with what consequences for human and environmental health will provide key insights into how people can better prevent deadly outbreaks and distribute vaccine benefits equitably. To do this, I will interview people implementing CEPI’s programs and analyze media coverage, CEPI’s governing documents, and epidemiological data collected within and outside CEPI to examine how this partnership operates in theory and in practice. Through this work, I expect to find that CEPI’s vaccine finance strategies successfully speed up vaccine development while producing unanticipated forms of violence. This includes increasing surveillance over vulnerable populations and diverting global health funds to actors who use international finance to promote forms of development that accelerate infectious disease emergence. However, I may also discover that CEPI’s strategies fail unexpectedly or that its partners work to implement less coercive forms of outbreak response and prevent dangerous environmental changes that lead to disease. This work will apply feminist scholarship in new ways by examining how producing vaccines both relies on and transforms social difference. These findings will also provide critical information on an emerging outbreak response strategy. Finally, they will improve scholars’ understanding of what it means to transform life into something sell-able like a vaccine since viruses operate at the boundary between living and nonliving.