Navigating Public Health: Life Hacks and Resistance Among Vaccine Sceptics in the Russian-Speaking Community in Germany

This paper analyses "life hacks", an emic term used by Russian-speaking vaccine sceptics in Germany to describe informal tricks for circumventing Covid-19 regulations or mitigating the effects of already received vaccines. Drawing on 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork, I discuss cases arranged along a continuum of vaccine doubt, including a physician who falsified PCR test dates to visit her hospitalised mother while avoiding vaccination during breastfeeding.
 

Scott's mētis and de Certeau's distinction between strategies and tactics offer a starting point for reading these practices. The picture, however, is more complicated: life hacks cannot be reduced to tactical responses to state strategies, nor to veiled political protest. They are shaped by intuitive judgements, by experiences, and by information that my research participants find insufficiently convincing. 
By examining these practices, the paper contributes to the study of distrust and of vaccination as a site of social negotiation.