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The UK response to Covid-19 has been unusually complex in its ever-shifting classifications of clinical vulnerability. By May 2020, 2.2 million people had been identified as ‘clinically extremely vulnerable’ (CEV) and were asked to ‘shield’ at home for over four months. To adhere to this strict guidance, they were enfolded within the patchy infrastructure of the ‘shielding programme’. However, membership of the ‘shielded list’ has changed—often without warning or explanation—through time and across space. Drawing on policy and evidentiary documents, government speeches, reports, press conferences and media analysis of Covid-19 coverage between March 2020 and April 1, 2021, this paper traces the shifting delineations of clinical vulnerability in the UK response across three lockdowns. It argues that the complexities and confusions generated by the transience of the CEV category have fed into forms of biosociality that have been as much about making practical sense of government guidance as a form of mutual support amid crisis. This uncertainty has not eased as restrictions have been relaxed and vaccines rolled out. Instead, tracing individual immune response has become a burgeoning industry as ‘the shielded’ navigate the uneasy demands of taking ‘personal responsibility’ rather than being protected by ‘the rules’.

In this paper, we explore the emergence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) as an object of political concern in and for countries of the global South. While epidemiologists and public health practitioners and scholars have long expressed concern with the changing global distribution of the burden of NCDs, it is only in more recent years that the aetiology, politics and consequences of these shifts have become an object of critical social scientific enquiry. These shifts mark the starting point for this special issue on ‘The Politics of NCDs in the Global South’ and act as the basis for new, critical interventions in how we understand NCDs. In this paper, we aim not only to introduce and contextualise the six contributions that form this special issue, but also to identify and explore three themes – problematisation, care and culture – that index the main areas of analytical and empirical concern that have motivated analyses of NCDs in the global South and are central to critical engagement with their political contours.

The syndrome that later received the name Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) was first announced by a communication published in the USA by the Centres for Disease Control (CDC): 'In the period October 1980–May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia [PCP]'. This chapter examines how AIDS has been conceptualised as an issue of global health. It describes the geographical imaginary of the first attempts to conceptualise AIDS as an issue of global health. The chapter outlines some of consequences of this global imaginary for AIDS policies, both in the USA and in South Africa. An early communication in The Lancet about AIDS among people of African origin began by listing the known risk groups for AIDS, remarking that condition had been found in 'homosexual or bisexual men, in drug addicts, in haemophiliacs, and in Haitian immigrants'. The epidemiological construction of a distinctively African AIDS was readily identified as racist by many cultural critics.