What to do with the new molecular publics: the vernacularization of pathogen genomics and the future of infectious disease biosocialities

Recent decades have seen expansions in the subfield of pathogen genomic epidemiology, also called ‘molecular epidemiology.’ Practitioners in this area analyze pathogen genetic sequence data to identify the emergence of pathogen subtypes or ‘variants,’ including ones that have evolved to have problematic biological characteristics such as greater transmissibility or treatment resistance. The field’s prominence has led to public controversies surrounding applications of pathogen genomics in disease control. The most highly visible examples occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the designation of SARS-CoV-2 ‘Variants of Concern’ by the World Health Organization shaped public health strategies, media stories, and everyday talk about the pandemic. Drawing on several cases, I argue that controversies around uses of pathogen genomics have driven the emergence of a novel kind of socio-technical form, which I call a ‘molecular public.’ Molecular publics materialize when pathogen genomic science enters public discourse through news media or similar means, followed by people recognizing themselves as being potentially at risk of becoming infected with a particular pathogen subtype or affected by policy responses to a variant. I present molecular publics as a useful analytic for social studies of infectious disease and a vector through which novel biosocialities mediated by pathogens can emerge.