Campaigns of Autoimmunity: Public Health Responses to AIDS and COVID-19

Abstract

This article uses the concept of autoimmunity as a framework to examine how public health, designed to help protect the entirety of a population (and therefore act as an immune system), turns to an autoimmune response during pandemic flare-ups. In this context, public health campaigns seek an overactive and overrepresented focus on historically marginalized and at-risk populations, resulting in a targeting that places both the self of the body politic and the non-self of the targeted population at risk for infection. The persistency of autoimmunity as public health is evident in the America Responds to AIDS campaign of the 1980s and 1990s and Ohio’s Together Ohio and More than a Mask campaigns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Using these examples, the article examines the paradox of distinguishing and blurring the self and non-self by emphasizing collective risk and collective action and overrepresenting Blackness, demonstrating a latent autoimmunity of prejudice that informs public health messaging and its reception.