Building a Roof Above Contested Knowledge: Public Epistemic Practices to Figure out Unexpected Vaccine Side Effects in South Korea

This study examines the recognition movement of the victims who have suffered from COVID-19 vaccine side effects and particularly focuses on their knowledge-making practices to represent as many side effects as possible. Using ethnography and in-depth interview methods, I analyze how they brought conflicting actors together by setting a unified destination where all the different interests and diverse facts converged. The victims could not prove their cases and were denied reparations since it would take 8-10 years to verify the causality between vaccination and the side effects. To move away from its dependence on scientific verification that bogs them down, they didn’t get involved in the debate around who deserves the reparation, but they deduced collective facts from the controversy. First, they framed their uncertainty as a common human vulnerability that indicates our shortage of knowledge as human beings. They inferred this from the scene in which scientific research progresses, and the criteria for proven causality continue to change and expand. Second, They questioned the purpose of reparations. They argued that the reparation system should serve not only to compensate individuals but also to encourage people to receive vaccinations during other upcoming pandemics. Given this, the criteria for causality should be relieved so that people can rely on the national public health system. In this framework, their uncertainties became our limitations, and their damages became our vulnerabilities and risks. The victim’s contextualized and specific knowledge demanding social responses to themselves has become general knowledge of how to take care of epistemic uncertainties and human vulnerabilities, which have been redefined as a persistent order of the world, not a temporary issue. Their approach highlights how societies can live with controversial knowledge and what kinds of justice or decisions could be made until the debate reaches an agreement.