Organising Inequality: Viral Contamination of Healthcare Policies During the COVID ‐19 Pandemic in Wales

ABSTRACT This article explores the role of the COVID‐19 virus in changing healthcare policies in Wales and their effects on pandemic inequalities. It draws on the analysis of policy documents and key informant interviews with government and healthcare officials in Wales conducted during the cross‐European study on the varying impacts of pandemic responses on vulnerable groups. Its contribution lies in the development of ‘viral thinking’ to reconsider both the biomedical approaches that overestimated rational pandemic responses and biopolitical interventions driven by the neoliberal logic of commodification of healthcare provision exacerbating patterns of exclusion. The analysis of viral contamination of Welsh healthcare is split into three parts and builds on post‐structuralist conceptualisations of the virus and its interactions with the state in the form of coding, decoding and production of surplus value. The virus disturbed the linear logic of the healthcare system and attempts to make it visible by coding it in biological or economic terms, and exposed the discriminatory politics of viral coding naturalising death and justifying the orders of inclusion and exclusion. Our findings also illustrate viral decoding that blurred the boundaries between humans and non‐humans, underscored the limitations of biopolitical management of life, indifference and naturalisation of inequalities in Welsh healthcare. The virus also produced collective and hybrid configurations of forces that undermined the key functions of healthcare as well as created new alliances, unusual forms of co‐existence and expressive responses to illness and death. The paper concludes with reflections on the possibilities of viral thinking to resist fixed categories of inequality and embrace virality as a potentially transformative mode of political thought and organisation.