Theme: Social Science & Policy Research Year: 2019
In 2016 the World Health Organization set a goal to eliminate viral hepatitis as a major public health
threat by 2030. The ‘race to elimination’ is rapidly changing the hepatitis C landscape, with a range
of effects for how the health of people living with hepatitis C is governed, and for how evidencemaking, interventions and policy are done. Drawing on thinking in the field of science and
technology studies concerned with loss of species, in this paper we explore the viral elimination era
in a new way. Through analysis of in-depth interviews (n=43) with researchers, modellers,
implementation scientists, global health advocates and policy makers, we explore the complex
processes of ‘viral elimination’ and consider what it means, how it comes to matter socially and
materially, and to whom. Paying attention to implementation, intervention, evidence-making and
policy practices, we begin to map how hepatitis C elimination is experienced, resisted, measured,
enunciated and performed, affecting how the ‘life’ and ‘loss’ of hepatitis C is governed in different
ways. This brings us to ask: What is altered as a virus is eliminated? What is made better or worse in
the communities in which this occurs? What relations are made possible or extinguished? And, what
does it mean to care and intervene in an elimination era? Thinking this way troubles the separation
of the biomedical and the social and opens up examination of viral elimination not only as a singular
biomedical event but as phenomenon inextricably and simultaneously biomedical and social, as well
as cultural, biological, political and economic. This paper therefore offers an initial mapping of what
is made possible, and what is left behind, in the race towards achieving hepatitis C elimination
targets.
Disclosure of Interest: None