Biossegurança e tratamentos experimentais: políticas farmacêuticas e a disputa pela governamentalidade da COVID-19 nos Estados Unidos

Abstract

How do authorities decide on therapeutics amid an unfolding health catastrophe? What is contested behind the scenes when measures become justified in the name of urgency? In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, circulation extended beyond viruses, graphs, and epidemiological curves; collective imaginaries surrounding potential antiviral drugs also played a central role. Despite the vast academic production on the pandemic, internal disputes within the State and among regimes of scientific expertise mobilized to manage the crisis remain underexplored. This article proposes a reconstruction of U.S. biosecurity policies throughout 2020, based on the analysis of a unique documentary archive. The collection was originally classified as secret, later made public through a House of Representatives Committee, and subsequently partially restricted again due to political disputes within Congress. The central hypothesis holds that the pandemic opened a field of contention between competing regimes of governing life, revealing a paradox rooted in incompatible rationalities. On one hand, classic devices of biopolitics persist, anchored in preventive protocols, standardized conduct, and population management techniques historically associated with Evidence-Based Medicine. On the other hand, a securitarian model of governance consolidates, oriented toward the management of uncertainty, the anticipation of disaster, and the legitimization of exceptional and adaptive interventions, here conceptualized as reflexive biopolitics. This structural tension unfolds across three interconnected planes: epistemological, opposing the stabilization of scientific knowledge to the primacy of preliminary evidence; temporal, confronting decisional acceleration with the slowness of regulatory protocols; and political-institutional, materializing in the centralization of power within the Executive Branch, in tension with mechanisms of deliberation, oversight, and accountability.