Over the course of the last several months, a series of chilling videos have been shared across Zambian social media, purporting to link COVID-19 vaccines with a global plot to reduce the world’s population through the mass murder of Africans. Such videos are easily framed within the Western folk category of the “conspiracy theory,” and in a literal sense the …
Tag Archives: Biomedicine
Situating COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Tanzania
In early February 2021, Tanzanian Health Minister Dorothy Gwajima announced that the Tanzanian government would not partake in COVID-19 vaccination campaigns—“we are not yet satisfied that those vaccines have been clinically proven safe.” Instead, Gwajima shared that the Government Chemist was testing and approving natural local remedies, where “these traditional remedies have been in use for ages in our societies …
Everyday Infection, Looming Threat: Hospital-Based Infection Control in the United States

During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals have served a dual role in regards to infection control and management. Hospital emergency rooms and intensive care units have been overrun with COVID-19 patients coming from the community. Hospitals have also been sites of infectious disease spread as healthcare workers and patients share space, air, and ultimately, germs. Hospitals exist …
The Thinness of Care: The Promise of Medical Anthropology in MD/PhD Training
In the mid-twentieth century, recognizing the growing need for innovations born of clinical experience, pathways for training MD-PhD physician-scientists emerged in the hopes that this hybrid training could produce novel insights into disease and ultimately, treatments. In the years since formal MD/PhD training programs were established, a growing number of institutions have established pathways for a combination with non-traditional disciplines, …
Medical Anthropology and Practice of Medicine in Health Issues
Abstract: It is known through anthropological literature that African countries are distinguished by a category of medicine that many specialists call ethnomedicine or traditional African medicine. Faced with biomedicine, ethnomedicine has often been relegated to the background in the resolution of health-related problems. However, ethnomedicine resurfaces in African countries, particularly in Cameroon, when there is no biomedical solution to a …