Introduction

COVID-19 brought into sharp relief the intersection of ageing, illness and care. This global pandemic exposed what we already knew: that we live in a world of global competition, not cooperation, as rich countries of the Global North competed with each other to vaccinate their populations whilst offering a derisory number of vaccines to countries with more restricted access to the drugs that save both individual lives and the wider social and economic systems within which we live. Global division, dispute and lack of cooperation then mirrored often divisive national discourses and policies that are strongly inflected by age itself.