Conspiracy theories are more about values than about information." Study conspiracy theories with compassion INST. FOR SOCIOLOGY/SLOVAK ACAD. SCIENCES

As the coronavirus started to spread in Ireland, the epidemiological data became the most sought-after information in the country. This article will examine the ways in which COVID-19 redefined the intimacies of the relationships that health professionals and the members of the public have with medical data. It will focus on Irish examples and explore how the context of the pandemic turned numbers from abstract cognitive tools into important and affective tenets of social lives that dictated the moral values and conditions of sociality. It will examine the role of enumeration and metrics in mediating new forms of intimacy with state and society.

Conspiracy theories are one way of dealing with gaps between hopes and reality, between the visible and the hidden, and between expert and lay knowledge. They are meaning systems that either explain or make sense of specific events or of social, political, or economic systems of power. Conspiracy theories assume that some actors intentionally conspire to harm others for their own benefit. Often they are linked to feelings of persecution against a way of life; against whole ethnic, racial, or religious groups; or against specific groups. They frequently address fundamental questions about the presence of good and evil, and purport to unveil hidden forces in the world. Thus, they are often connected to cosmologies in ways that make for interesting anthropological scrutiny.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, two contrasting images quickly became representative of the crisis. On the one hand, there were heroic doctors working day and night with the novel virus, risking their lives and making sacrifices to save others. On the other, there were ‘anti-maskers’ and ‘anti-vaxxers’: people doubting if the virus is real, questioning the effectiveness of protective measures, suspicious that the crisis is nothing more than an elaborate plot, a scam aimed to redesign their world and to destroy the values they hold dear. Reflecting on research conducted in Ireland with people separated by the conspiratorial divide, this paper examines some methodological and analytical challenges of doing simultaneous research with opposing stakeholders. Analysing my own entanglements in the conflicts over vaccines and conspiracy theories in this paper I argue that the pandemic was not just a battle to secure the acceptability of specific medical technology (the COVID-19 vaccine) but was also about safeguarding respectability of science and maintaining the rule of experts. It was about preventing ontological turn, the end of the era of reason, a dawn of modernity.

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