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The years 2020 and 2021 will be remembered as a time profoundly marked by the COVID-19 pandemic. We have all had to come to grips with the effects of this invisible global menace, which has left any number of visible traces behind in its wake, not only individually but also as members of the communities, whatever contours and foundations they may have, to which we belong. Religious communities in particular have attempted to adapt to, or in some cases resist, the strictures imposed by various forms of lockdown which have lasted for varying stretches of time, have created rituals intended to address the needs and concerns of their members, and have formulated explanations for the emergence of the pandemic in terms of their doctrinal systems. The first five articles in this issue of Approaching Religion explore such community-based ways of interpreting and dealing with the impact of the COVID-19 crisis.

Acknowledging the significance of the COVID-19 pandemic as an exacerbating factor for precarious US communities, this article reads Tony Kushner’s critically acclaimed play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1992-95) and Michael Henson’s collection of short stories Maggie Boylan (2015) alongside Susan Sontag (Illness as Metaphor), Jasbir Puar (The Right to Maim) and Lauren Berlant (“Slow Death”). The play and the short story collection represent examples of critiques of a deep-rooted disorder that characterizes the precaritizing American social and political system. From the severely mishandled AIDS crisis in Reagan’s conservative United States to the equally disastrous management of the opioid and meth epidemics in the 21st century, American society and politicians are failing their citizens, a failure reflected in and critiqued by literary texts. Whereas Angels in America is an overtly political drama, in which marginalized people come together to respond to political erasure and violence with imaginative countercultural utopianism, Maggie Boylan traces the gradual decay and corruption of a contemporary American community, functioning as a microcosm of the Unites States as a whole. This society is plagued by several crippling “epidemics” and “crises” that leave bodies broken and communities in tatters. Despite glimmers of hope, Kushner and Henson paint a grim picture of a sickness at the core of American society.

Even before it had been developed there had already been skepticism among the general public concerning a vaccine for COVID-19. What are the factors that drive this skepticism? While much has been said about how political differences are at play, in this article I draw attention to two additional factors that have not received as much attention: witnessing the fallibility of the scientific process play out in real time, and a perceived breakdown of the distinction between experts and non-experts.

Background Various forms of contact restrictions have been adopted in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Around February 2021, rapid testing appeared as a new policy instrument. Some claim it may serve as a substitute for contact restrictions. We study the strength of this argument by evaluating the effects of a unique policy experiment: In March and April 2021, the city of Tübingen set up a testing scheme while relaxing contact restrictions. Methods We compare case rates in Tübingen county to an appropriately identified control unit. We employ the synthetic control method. We base interpretations of our findings on an extended SEIR model. Findings The experiment led to an increase in the reported case rate. This increase is robust across alternative statistical specifications. This is also due to more testing leading initially to more reported cases. An epidemiological model that corrects for ‘more cases due to more testing’ and ‘reduced testing and reporting during the Easter holiday’ confirms that the overall effect of the experiment led to more infections. Interpretation The number of rapid tests were not sufficiently high in this experiment to compensate for more contacts and thereby infections caused by relaxing contact restrictions.

The Danish–German border in the Schleswig region was drawn in 1920. It separated a hitherto economically and socially integrated region, taking into account the right of national self-determination. Since the late 20th century, Danish and German stakeholders have celebrated a narrative of overcoming the border. Thus, it came as a shock to local stakeholders when the border was closed in mid-March 2020 to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The border subsequently reopened in steps with more or less free travel in the summer. Since October, however, new restrictions were imposed as infection numbers began rising in both countries.

Dr James Rogers explains how we can draw parallels between the current COVID-19 pandemic and the Second World War, particularly in how humans have responded to an extraordinary challenge.

In the past few months more than a billion people have faced restrictions unlike any seen before. Shops are closed; the death toll is rising; people across the globe have been forced to rise to an extraordinary challenge. But it is important to remember that humans have experienced pandemics before. In this documentary Dan Snow explores some of these previous pandemics and what they can teach us about Covid-19. He talks to Dr James Rogers about what lessons we can learn from WW2.

The contributors Peter Aaby was trained as an anthropologist but has built a large health surveillance system in Guinea-Bissau since 1978, focusing on the high levels of child mortality there. Crowding and intensive exposure to measles were key determinants of child mortality. This led to vaccine research and the discovery of the non-specific effects of measles vaccine. Christine Stabell Benn is a professor in global health at the University of Southern Denmark. She conducts epidemiological and immunological studies of vaccines and vitamin A, with a focus on their real-life effects on overall health in Africa and Denmark. She formulated the hypothesis that these health interventions with immunomodulatory effects interact, often in a sex-differential manner. Katie L. Flanagan is Director of Infectious Diseases for north/north-west Tasmania, an adjunct professor at the University of Tasmania and RMIT University and an adjunct associate professor at Monash University. She is Honorary Secretary of the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases (ASID), Chair of the ASID Vaccination Special Interest Group and a member of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation. Her current research focuses on using systems vaccinology to study the sex-differential and non-targeted effects of vaccines. Sabra L. Klein is a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, USA. She is an expert on sex and gender differences in immune responses and susceptibility to infection. She is the immediate past president of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences, a principal investigator of the Johns Hopkins Specialized Center for Research Excellence in sex and age differences in immunity to influenza and a co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Women’s Health, Sex, and Gender Research. Tobias R. Kollmann is a paediatric infectious disease clinician and systems vaccinologist at Telethon Kids Institute and Perth Children’s Hospital in Perth, Australia. His expertise centres on newborn infectious diseases, immune ontogeny and early-life vaccine responses, using cutting-edge technology and analytics to extract the most information out of the typically small biological samples obtainable in early life. David J. Lynn is Director of the Computational and Systems Biology Program and an EMBL Australia group leader at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute. He is also a professor at the Flinders University College of Medicine and Public Health. He leads a research programme in systems immunology, investigating how pathogenic and commensal microorganisms modulate the immune system in different contexts, including vaccination. Frank Shann worked as a paediatrician in Papua New Guinea and then for 20 years was Director of Intensive Care at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. He is a professorial fellow in the Department of Paediatrics, University of Melbourne, engaged in research on the non-specific effects of vaccines. The textbook view of vaccination is that it functions to induce immune memory of the specific pathogen components of the vaccine, leading to a quantitatively and qualitatively better response if the host is exposed to infection with the same pathogen. However, evidence accumulated over the past few decades increasingly suggests that vaccines can also have non-specific effects on unrelated infections and diseases, with important implications for childhood mortality particularly in low-income settings. Furthermore, many of these non-specific effects, as well as the pathogen-specific effects, of vaccines show differences between the sexes. Here, members of the Optimmunize consortium discuss the evidence for and potential mechanisms of non-specific and sex-differential effects of vaccines, as well as their potential policy implications. Given that the non-specific effects of some vaccines are now being tested for their ability to protect against COVID-19, the authors also comment on the broader implications of these trials. In this Viewpoint article, members of the Optimmunize consortium discuss the evidence for non-specific and sex-differential effects of vaccines and how this information might inform vaccine design and policy, including in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.