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In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the concept of mutual aid was rapidly taken up as an ideal model for solidarity. This paper examines why mutual aid may have found such popularity in this moment by examining the affective underpinnings of risk, vulnerability and the imperative to care. Rather than celebrate the turn to mutual aid as the best path towards justice, however, the paper suggests that we think strategically about the models we use for survival, by considering mutual aid as one strategy among many for generating our responses to the harms that predate, and are intensified through, the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]