The aff’s expansion of state authority in the name of pandemic prevention gives the state validation to ignore its devaluation of systemic minority life

The lives and deaths of vulnerable groups during infectious disease outbreaks like in COVID-19, result from political and structural violence, health and social policies, cultural interpretations, or moral decisions (Larocque & Foth, ). Social policy and public health are among the factors Fassin () considered relevant in biopolitics. He argued that biopolitics is about demography, epidemiology, and psychology on the one side, and family planning, public health, and the policing of the self on the other side. Fassin also noted that although biopolitics defined by Foucault et al. () as regulation of populations through techniques of knowledge and intervention (p. 183) – does relate to inequalities, it is obviously related to interventions and policies, knowledge and information. Fassin () explained that “to make live” – which is how biopower is usually understood–is also “to reject into death,” either practically as a consequence of policymakers' neglect towards certain population groups or intellectually as a result of not measuring the effects of these policies. He also asserted that racist discrimination within social and legal systems profoundly influences every aspect of life, including biological life. Hence, politics is not only about the rules of the game of governing but also about its stakes and its power to de/legitimizing lives (Fassin, ).

COVID-19 unmasked the politics of public health policies through the death ratios of vulnerable populations. The patterns of death during the coronavirus pandemic reveal the biopolitical governmentality of death and the power apparatuses, or dispositifs in Foucault's words, used by governments to let vulnerable people die. By governmentality, I refer to Foucault's link between the governor and the biopolitical control of populations, which he states in his definition of biopower and biopolitics as

[A] power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations (Foucault et al., , p. 137)

In the context of COVID-19, this definition is clearly embedded in governments' attempts to protect lives, control the spread of the coronavirus, and mitigate its impact on the global economic and social order. However, governments have also exerted their biopower in ways that negatively impact vulnerable persons' lives, endeavoring to administer their death, minimize their lives, and let them die. On the one hand, governments have imposed behaviors, such as physical and social distancing, the use of personal protection equipment (PPE), and enforced self-isolation, but on the other hand, they have ignored or even hindered attempts to implement these rules among vulnerable populations who have no access to water or PPE. Whether individuals have been forced to adapt their behaviors or ignored has hinged on underlying governments' perceptions about who deserves life and who deserves death. Foucault's seminal lectures on biopolitics revealed how the state's claim to authority is based on the power to make live and let die (Smith, ). Similarly, Mbembe () named the dichotomy central to the governing of living and dying as that of “making live/letting die” and asserted that the “ultimate expression of sovereignty resides in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (p.11). Furthermore, he argued that “to exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power” (Mbembe, , p. 12). This statement has been used in sociological work on asylum seekers, refugees, and stateless and illegalized migrants to explore the consensus among politicians and governments that some human lives are worthless and that it is permissible to let them die (Daher-Nashif, ; Davies et al., ; Mayblin et al., ; Round & Kuznetsova, ). Pandemics intensify worthlessness because the risks faced by these populations are often overlooked; so too is their agency to respond to these crises (McGee, ). Drawing on Foucault's and Mbembe's concepts of bio- and necropowers, Judith Butler suggested the concept of precarity, defining it as a “politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (Butler,, P. 25). Butler(, also noted that precariousness/vulnerability is an existential condition common to all life because everyone is vulnerable in some way; everyone needs shelter and food and depends on wider networks of sociality and labor. More specifically, precarity is the political/social/spatial predicament of those (termed the precariat) who are exposed to disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and violence without protection (). Joronen and Rose () argued that whether it adopts a post-structuralist, Marxist, postcolonial, affective, queer, feminist, or non-representational approach, work on precarity consistently emphasizes how it is used and induced as a political, social, spatial, and/or governmental force–a means to control, resist, marginalize, and exclude. Joronen and Rose () argue that precariousness should be approached first and foremost as a political, social, racial, spatial, and/or gender problem, rather than a defining existential condition of all living beings.

COVID-19 mortality statistics reveal that many deaths among vulnerable populations, such as refugees, immigrants, stateless, and ethnic minorities, could have been prevented if governments had seen their lives as worth saving. This section presents specific examples of COVID-19 mortality ratios and clarifies how necropolitical and necrocapital governmentality during COVID-19 saved some lives and “reject[ed] into death” others (Fassin, , p. 52). A combination of socio-political factors such as age, race, class, gender, and citizenship structured the inequality that led to increased death rates among these vulnerable groups. Hence, intersectionality is an important framework for understanding COVID-19 mortality and some governments' practices of “letting die.” As suggested by Gkiouleka et al. (), the framework of intersectionality facilitates a better sociological understanding of health inequalities beyond the purely socioeconomic. Intersectionality highlights how power and inequality are structured differently for groups, particularly oppressed groups, based on their varied interlocking socio-political identities (Bowleg, ). This concept has been employed in many feminist works addressing how women are simultaneously positioned as women and, for example, as Black, working-class, lesbian, or colonial subjects (Brah & Phoenix, ; Daher-Nashif, ). Several social and public health studies have adopted intersectionality as a framework to analyze disparities during the first and second waves of COVID-19, but other researchers have criticized the flattened framing of intersectionality as simply defined by multiple identities, calling for its historic focus on power and interlocking structural inequality to be brought to the fore (Lokot & Avakyan, ). They also argue that this flattened use of intersectionality has led to depoliticization and stripped the concept of its attention to power, social justice, and praxis (Bowleg, ). The main argument here is that the governments' managing or mismanaging of the pandemic reflects the politics driving health and public health policies. A few governments, such as Brazil's, chose not to manage the pandemic in its beginnings, which led to extremely high death rates among the most vulnerable groups. Graves had to be dug using excavators to respond to the scale of the need, corpses were placed in rows in hospital corridors, and elderly patients were sent to die at home (Ortega & Orsini, ). Furthermore, the “soft” reaction of some governments shifted the responsibility for life and death to the individual (Giritli-Nygren & Olofsson, ), which largely reflects the attitudes in public health discourses as mentioned above. The Swedish government, for example, responded to the first wave of the pandemic with recommendations rather than prohibitions, creating a situation in which the individuals were the decision-makers, to be blamed and viewed as responsible if they failed to manage their health or act according to the social and/or governmental expectations. This takes us back to the public health approach that sees individual behaviors as the key factor to better health, ignoring politics and policies and socioeconomic determinants of health. The “soft” administration of Sweden and other governments, releases the state from its responsibility for saving the lives of its vulnerable inhabitants, that is, those who are most in need of state protection in emergencies and crises like pandemics. Other governments imposed extremely strict restrictions as a protective tool but did not consider the implications of lockdowns on vulnerable groups, who were precarious before the pandemic. The next section focuses on governments' political policies and their impact on the precariat, that is, the most vulnerable populations, those who are unable to control their exposure to vulnerability and death (Butler, ) due to their political status.