While everyone has been impacted directly or indirectly by the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures to contain it, not everyone has been impacted in the same way and certainly not to the same degree. Media coverage in early 2020 emphasized the “unprecedented” nature of the pandemic, and some even predicted that the virus could be a global “equalizer.” Ensuing debates over how the pandemic should be handled have often hinged on oppositions between protecting health and healthcare systems versus saving livelihoods and the economy, a dichotomy that we argue is false. Drawing on 482 interviews conducted in Germany, Italy, Ireland, Austria, German-speaking Switzerland and the UK over two points in a 6-month period as part of the ‘Solidarity in times of Pandemics Research Consortium’ (SolPan), we illustrate the ways that oppositions posed between saving lives or saving livelihoods fail to capture the entangled, long-standing nature of structural inequalities that have been revealed through the pandemic. Health- and wealth-related inequalities intersect to produce the “second pandemic,” a term used by a research participant to explain the other forms of devastation that run in parallel with virus. Our findings thus complicate such dichotomies through a qualitative understanding of the pandemic as a lived experience. The pandemic emerges as a critical juncture which, in exacerbating these existing structural inequalities, also poses an opportunity to work to better resolve them.

Mobile applications for digital contact tracing have been developed and introduced around the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Proposed as a tool to support 'traditional' forms of contact-tracing carried out to monitor contagion, these apps have triggered an intense debate with respect to their legal and ethical permissibility, social desirability and general feasibility. Based on a large-scale study including qualitative data from 349 interviews conducted in nine European countries

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This conceptual chapter evokes Albert Hirschman’s classic distinction between “exit” and “voice” to ascertain the potential for individuals to voice their concerns in the context of sharing data for genetics and personalized precision medicine initiatives. It elaborates the emerging framework of participatory medicine as a form of “invited activism” and goes on to discuss the essential role of activism by considering the strategies implemented by institutions to trigger voice when it is not initiated spontaneously. On the one hand, we diagnose a generalized failure of concerned actors to voice spontaneously around voluntary data sharing for future-oriented medical research. On the other hand, we scrutinize patient and public involvement practices made available by precision medicine initiatives as institutional attempts to increase voice and therefore as “invited activism.” We finally interrogate the limits of voice in this invited format in the context of genomics initiatives.

Calls for solidarity have been an ubiquitous feature in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, we know little about how people have thought of and practised solidarity in their everyday lives since the beginning of the pandemic. What role does solidarity play in people’s lives, how does it relate to COVID-19 public health measures and how has it changed in different phases of the pandemic? Situated within the medical humanities at the intersection of philosophy, bioethics, social sciences and policy studies, this article explores how the practice-based understanding of solidarity formulated by Prainsack and Buyx helps shed light on these questions. Drawing on 643 qualitative interviews carried out in two phases (April–May 2020 and October 2020) in nine European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, German-speaking Switzerland and the UK), the data show that interpersonal acts of solidarity are important, but that they are not sustainable without consistent support at the institutional level. As the pandemic progressed, respondents expressed a longing for more institutionalised forms of solidarity. We argue that the medical humanities have much to gain from directing their attention to individual health issues, and to collective experiences of health or illness. The analysis of experiences through a collective lens such as solidarity offers unique insights to understandings of the individual and the collective. We propose three essential advances for research in the medical humanities that can help uncover collective experiences of disease and health crises: (1) an empirical and practice-oriented approach alongside more normative approaches; (2) the confidence to make recommendations for practice and policymaking and (3) the pursuit of cross-national and multidisciplinary research collaborations.