‘Who do we not save?’: Biolegitimacy, the right to health and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the well-being of frontline workers in the United Kingdom

This article examines the experiences of frontline workers in the United Kingdom to understand how they navigated changes to services during COVID-19 and the impact this had on their well-being. It uses qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with frontline workers from various sectors, including health and social care, criminal justice, education, and community-led organisations. It examines some of the challenges they faced and uses Fassin’s concept of biolegitimacy (the sacredness assigned to biological life) to understand the tensions and contradictions in the United Kingdom’s response to the pandemic, which emphasised saving lives but, at the same time, did not value all lives equally. The article highlights how the primacy afforded to the National Health Service and COVID-related care created hierarchies of frontline work; considers workers’ experiences of vicarious suffering; and workers’ subjugation of their own needs to continue providing care to individuals they considered disadvantaged by the public health response to COVID-19. The article further argues there is a gendered dimension to these experiences, as women in the research bore the brunt of ill-considered, generic policy responses which failed to account for their specific needs. By using the concept of biolegitimacy to understand workers’ experiences, the article connects the micro-level experiences of frontline workers to wider value systems to consider how lives are evaluated in periods of crisis, providing an understanding of workers’ experiences that goes beyond the organisational level.