Risk Groups and Essential Workers During COVID ‐19: Definitions and Vaccine Priority Strategies

The coronavirus vaccine, available at the end of 2020, can be seen as a scarce resource where the nation state created hierarchies within the society in terms of who was in and who was out of a social group, with tangible effects of some receiving the vaccine faster than others. Through a comparative document analysis, this paper investigates how symbolic boundaries were made by looking at risk groups and essential workers as well as the vaccine strategies in Europe. While these two groups were theoretically constructed as either vulnerable or exposed during the pandemic, results indicate that group boundaries were in fact fluid. This finding adds to the literature on symbolic boundaries by showcasing how the state created social and medical hierarchies by classifying certain social and professional groups as worthy of protection but also how new classifications were created for a specific segment of the population during the COVID‐19 pandemic health crisis.