Introduction

Who made the vaccine? When journalist Sirin Kale went to meet the vaccine scientists last year, she found collaborative teams working long hours in a race against time. Vaccine research is hard and not particularly well paid. What was the secret of success? she asked. Our husbands, our families, our networks, her interviewees responded: you can’t make a vaccine without someone cooking your dinner, doing your laundry and looking after your children. As these dedicated modern scientists saw it, care made the vaccine.

Stories of care have been the steady baseline beat of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the beginning our spirits were raised by acts of spontaneous community care – the WhatsApp groups that enabled neighbours to support one another: collecting medicines, providing company, preparing Iftar suppers. Those of us who participated found that we felt just that bit better from connecting with and helping others.

More alarming was the thrum of crisis that came from our care homes: the realisation that too many were dying – that care homes had been abandoned, required to tend vulnerable older people without the requisite resources and protection. Tragically, care workers themselves became vectors of contagion as many were forced to continue working even when unwell – on low pay, without benefits, they had no other options if their families were to eat.

As schools closed, millions more families found their lives hanging from increasingly precarious threads. The ‘she-cession’, the dent to women’s work as nurseries closed and home-schooling increasingly fell to mothers, has made headlines. Schools are a form of care that allow us to work. They are also the places where vulnerable children are cared for – through the provision of school meals, the presence of trusted adults and much needed friendship.

This pandemic has exposed a deep crisis in care. Despite decades of brilliant work: the research, the policy papers, the advocacy and the data, we are stuck. So, today we want to ask how could things be different? Can we tell a new story about the ways in which care would enable all of us to flourish? A story that ignites imaginations and moves us towards new action? Can we care about care?

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