Efficacy of solidarity as a public health response

This article examines solidarity as both a promise and a problem in public health discourse. Against accounts that treat solidarity as a moral feeling, civic mood or exhortation to comply, it argues that solidarity becomes ethically meaningful only when it is tethered to action, institutional obligation and distributive consequence. The article develops this claim through a medical humanities reading of two epidemic archives: HIV/AIDS activism and COVID-19 governmental address. Reading AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) repertoires in the USA, France and England, it shows how grief, anger and care were converted into targeted institutional pressure directed at governments, regulatory bodies, medical authorities and markets. Solidarity here appears not as sentiment but as a political technology for making abandonment visible and costly. The article then turns to COVID-19 speeches in France, the UK, the USA and Italy, where solidarity is repeatedly mobilised through war metaphors, unity claims and appeals to sacrifice. These addresses often recast public health failure as individual moral responsibility, making compliance the most visible sign of civic virtue while leaving institutional accountability comparatively underspecified. The article concludes that solidarity can be reclaimed only if it is constrained into obligation-talk: a language of enforceable duties, material supports, rights to care and institutional accountability. Where that constraint cannot hold, solidarity risks becoming an alibi for unequal vulnerability rather than a response to it.