Reprogramming the story: Edible insects as vaccines

Abstract

Animal-centric scientific research during the pandemic has produced an epistemic dilemma, in which knowledge about the evolutionary nature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its transmission to humans produces discrimination against Asian peoples as a by-product. More constructive awareness and analysis of how frameworks that support narratives of human exceptionalism persist and lead to this conundrum are needed in order to envision ways to redistribute global ways of knowing zoonotic epidemics beyond questions concerning origins. By exploring the history of the baculovirus expression system (a biological technology relying on a moth-specific virus to mass-produce recombinant proteins) and how it came to be used in recent vaccine development, this essay explores expanding, changing uses of insects that complicate the familiar binary categories that pit them as either harmful or beneficial. The conceptual undoing of this binary illuminates possibilities for the kinds of conversations that are necessary to work against the hate- and fear-driven dehumanisation that the pandemic enabled. © 2022 The authors.