Revision summary
COVID-19 showed bodily dependence on nature and on laboratory technique. Exposure was socially structured: crowding, care work, migrant walks. Beck’s risk society and Latour’s hybrids fit better than raw surrender. Science healed and also excluded and surveilled. Vaccine nationalism showed hierarchy in science itself. Comment: dependent, not equally at mercy.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic showed humans as bodies in a viral ecology, as patients of laboratories, and as subjects of apps, lockdowns, and vaccines. Mercy here means dependence without control. Humanity was not helpless in every sense. It was exposed.
Body
Nature
- A zoonotic virus reminded us that society sits in nature, which Karl Marx already treated as metabolism with the earth.
- Density, wet markets, and global travel are social natures, not a revenge of a pure wilderness.
- Ulrich Beck’s risk society: manufactured uncertainties return as side-effects of our own organisation.
Science and technology
- Virology, oxygen plants, and mRNA platforms were conditions of survival, not optional culture.
- Bruno Latour’s hybrids: the virus-in-the-PCR-machine is neither raw nature nor pure society.
- Technology also harmed: misinformation, exclusion from telemedicine, and surveillance apps.
Mercy or relation?
- Emile Durkheim’s social facts include mortality rates that no one person authors, as the pandemic curve showed.
- Max Weber’s rationalisation met a limit: calculation lagged the pathogen.
- Informal labour and migrant walks in India showed that “humanity” was stratified. Ann Oakley’s care work and caste crowding were the real mercy map.
Comment
- At the mercy of nature: yes as bodies; no as if culture did not shape exposure.
- At the mercy of science and technology: dependent on them, and also governed by those who own labs and platforms.
- The pandemic was a teacher of interdependence, not of simple surrender.
After the peak
- Vaccine nationalism and patent fights showed science as a world-system good, after Immanuel Wallerstein’s sense of hierarchy.
- Memory of lockdown is now a social fact for a cohort.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD NAT[Viral nature] --> EXP[Exposure] SCI[Science technology] --> EXP SCI --> HEAL[Vaccine oxygen] SOC[Class caste gender] --> EXP EXP --> COV[COVID-19 situation]
Conclusion
In the pandemic, humanity was at the mercy of a natural pathogen and of the sciences and techniques that named, tracked, and sometimes healed it. Comment: dependence is real; equal mercy is false. Marx’s metabolism, Beck’s risk, and Indian migrant labour show a structured exposure, not a single human fate.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Technology has accelerated the process of development and dependency. Discuss.
Next question on this syllabus topic (2020 · Q7(a)). View answer →
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Did science save us, or did it fail?
It produced vaccines and oxygen knowledge. It did not equally deliver them. Both are true.
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Is the next pandemic destiny?
Ecology and travel make risk likely. Public health capacity decides how much mercy we beg.
Same topic · past papers
UPSC has asked this before
These previous-year questions sit on the same topic. Open one to practise the earlier ask.
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2021 · Q8(b) · Sociology GS 1 · 15 marks
Describe the role of Science and Technology in enabling us to face the challenges triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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