The worldwide COVID‐19 crisis has highlighted perhaps more than ever before in the history of SHI the need for a critical sociological lens alongside the clinical, public health and organisational discussion of the current pandemic as it continues through 2020. In particular, debates around social inequalities in health and medicine have received new attention globally. A research note by one of us (Will, 1) suggested in the spring that sociologists should pause and reflect as the pandemic progressed but many of us have now been able to begin empirical research on the experience of and response to the coronavirus around the world. At the same time, only some of that research is ready for publication: other projects will take time. As a result, the editorial team of this journal hesitated to assemble a special issue on the pandemic too hastily.

We began by making our previous 2013 Pandemic Monograph open access online, and then invited all the authors to contribute contemporary reflections or commentaries given their expertise on pandemics before COVID‐19. We are now able to launch the SHI Virtual Special Issue (VSI) with some of the results alongside a research note making a call for sociological action from Lee Monaghan.

Other pieces on COVID‐19 are still welcome from authors who were not in our original monograph, and a number of papers are under review or being revised as we write. We therefore hope to be able to add more empirical work to this VSI, though we note that an enormous amount of medical and health sociology research is going to focus on COVID‐19 for the foreseeable future. Each piece offers something different, but rather than summarise them here in turn, we hope to offer our own reflections on the process and on the role of the journal in relation to other platforms promoting sociological understanding of the pandemic, health care and health more generally.

What have we learned from producing this VSI over summer 2020? It has yielded an enormously varied set of submissions, but perhaps first and foremost it has clarified for us that whilst immediate responses are important, some are not suitable for journals, which should we believe be a place for content that will be readable and interesting in the longer term. Our ambition to publish only peer‐reviewed material has also made it difficult to get things out quickly, at a time when it is hard to find reviewers and we are all too aware of the pressures on those juggling caring responsibilities with demands to reimagine teaching and research work.

For those wishing to publish fast, we would probably recommend that people consider writing for the various blogs that are active on COVID‐19. Cost of Living is sponsored by the British Sociological Association (BSA) to discuss the politics, economics and sociology of health and health care. Discover Society, another BSA blog, offers a broader view of sociological topics of contemporary relevance. Somatosphere, which is perhaps most clearly associated with our colleagues in medical anthropology, is also willing to consider sociological work, especially but not exclusively when it has a geographical focus beyond the global north; and Sociology Lens is a platform hosted by our publishers Wiley. Writing in these – and indeed in the media more generally – is we believe vital work. We know there is a thirst for sociological critique and analysis as people are learning to appreciate the importance of behaviour, meaning, and social and political organisation in keeping populations safe.

The mention of Somatosphere is instructive for other reasons. One of our disappointments in doing the VSI is that the voices and stories from the global South have been largely lacking. In part, this is about the material submitted, but not entirely. We have learned over the summer that the difficulties getting timely reviews are magnified when the piece addresses experiences outside what Marilyn Strathern calls the ‘Euroamerican’. We continue to seek this work out actively and hope to support authors as far as we can as an editorial team, building on manifest commitment to diversifying our community and reflecting different experiences here in the UK and elsewhere. COVID‐19 comparisons have not always reflected well on the UK’s National Health Service and systems of public health, but they have reminded us that international comparisons can be instructive, and help develop better theories of global processes and events. In this case, it is clearly worth spending time not only on the national and nationalistic elements of the response to the pandemic, replete with military metaphors, but also the patchwork of different ‘public’ and ‘private’ initiatives across the world.

There are some other gaps in the discussion that we feel able to draw attention to in part because we participated in the Cost of Living COVID‐19 panel at the BSA Medical Sociologyonline conference in early September 2020. High among those would be the politics of trust and mistrust in expertise, the national and international dynamics affecting compliance or adherence to public health measures generally and vaccine debates and the emergence and flow of different forms of knowledge. As the pandemic continues to run, we think the discipline is well placed to draw attention to and defend lay attempts to make sense of governmental messages and of the virus itself, both in general and among particular groups with good reason not to trust in experts or state agencies. Running alongside the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement reminds us that ethnic minorities and other marginalised groups including migrants feel victimised and alienated from the police, that disabled people feel closed out of the workplace, and racialised groups feel discriminated against in health services. For us, then the inequalities of the pandemic are no surprise, even when we are hopefully quick to organise to help address and explain them. We can also take inspiration from the well‐documented examples of political organising and mutual aid in different countries, not just as a bland celebration of ‘community’ but also through very practical examples like the QueerCare protocols for community support and transfeminist advocacy. At the same time, we need to build on the research done on HIV/AIDS mobilisations to explore how different ‘lay’ understandings and indeed practices link with institutionalised knowledge‐making now and in the future.

We look forward to reading more of the many studies that we know are underway with some of the rapid response funding already awarded or in the pipeline, and to participating in debates about the pandemic with our readers through the journal, including its social media activity, and the other platforms recommended above, which together help make up our medical sociology community.

全球范围的 COVID-19 危机在 SHI 的历史上可能比以往任何时候都更加突出，在当前流行病持续到 2020 年的临床、公共卫生和组织讨论的同时，需要一个批判性的社会学视角。特别是围绕社会的辩论健康和医学领域的不平等在全球范围内受到新的关注。我们中的一个人的研究报告 (Will, 1) 在春天建议社会学家应该随着大流行的进展停下来反思，但我们中的许多人现在已经能够开始对世界各地冠状病毒的经历和反应进行实证研究。与此同时，只有部分研究可以发表：其他项目需要时间。因此，该杂志的编辑团队犹豫是否过于仓促地为这一流行病集结了专刊。

我们首先将我们之前的 2013 年大流行专着在线开放获取，然后邀请所有作者根据他们对 COVID-19 之前的流行病的专业知识贡献当代反思或评论。我们现在可以发布 SHI 虚拟特刊 (VSI)，其中包含一些结果以及一份呼吁李·莫纳汉 (Lee Monaghan) 采取社会学行动的研究报告。

其他关于 COVID-19 的文章仍然受到不在我们原始专着中的作者的欢迎，并且在我们撰写时，一些论文正在审查或修订中。因此，我们希望能够为这个 VSI 添加更多的实证工作，尽管我们注意到在可预见的未来，大量的医学和健康社会学研究将集中在 COVID-19 上。每篇文章都提供了一些不同的东西，但不是在这里依次总结它们，我们希望对这个过程以及期刊在与其他平台相关的作用方面进行反思，以促进对大流行、医疗保健和健康的社会学更广泛的理解.

我们从 2020 年夏季生产此 VSI 中学到了什么？它产生了各种各样的提交，但也许首先它向我们阐明了虽然立即回复很重要，但有些不适合期刊，我们应该相信期刊是一个内容可读且有趣的地方长期。我们只发表经过同行评审的材料的野心也使得我们很难在很难找到审稿人的情况下快速发表文章，而且我们都非常清楚那些兼顾照顾责任和要求重新构想教学和教学的压力。研究工作。

对于那些希望快速发布的人，我们可能会建议人们考虑为 COVID-19 上活跃的各种博客写作。Cost of Living 由英国社会学协会 (BSA) 赞助，讨论健康和医疗保健的政治、经济和社会学。发现社会，另一个 BSA 博客，提供了对当代相关社会学主题的更广泛的看法。Somatosphere 可能与我们医学人类学的同事最明显地联系在一起，也愿意考虑社会学工作，特别是但不完全是当它的地理重点超出全球北部时；和社会学镜头是由我们的出版商 Wiley 托管的平台。在这些中写作——实际上在更普遍的媒体中——是我们认为至关重要的工作。

出于其他原因，提到 Somatosphere 是有益的。我们在做 VSI 时的失望之一是，在很大程度上缺乏来自全球南方的声音和故事。在某种程度上，这与提交的材料有关，但并非完全如此。我们在夏天了解到，当这篇文章涉及玛丽莲·斯特拉森所谓的“欧美”之外的经历时，获得及时评论的困难被放大了。我们将继续积极寻求这项工作，并希望作为一个编辑团队，尽我们所能支持作者，建立在使我们的社区多样化并反映英国和其他地方的不同经验的明确承诺的基础上。COVID-19 的比较并不总能很好地反映英国的国家卫生服务和公共卫生系统，但它们提醒我们，国际比较具有指导意义，有助于发展更好的全球进程和事件理论。在这种情况下，显然值得花时间不仅在应对大流行的国家和民族主义元素上，充满军事隐喻，而且在世界各地不同“公共”和“私人”倡议的拼凑上。

讨论中还有一些其他差距，我们认为能够引起注意，部分原因是我们参加了 2020 年 9 月上旬 BSA 医学社会学在线会议的生活成本 COVID-19 小组。其中最重要的是信任政治以及对专业知识、影响总体遵守或遵守公共卫生措施的国家和国际动态以及疫苗辩论以及不同形式知识的出现和流动的不信任。随着大流行继续蔓延，我们认为该学科很适合引起人们的注意并捍卫非专业人士试图理解政府信息和病毒本身的企图，无论是在一般情况下还是在有充分理由不信任专家或特定群体的特定群体中。国家机构。与疫情同行，Black Lives Matter 运动提醒我们，少数民族和其他边缘化群体（包括移民）感到受到了警察的伤害和疏远，残疾人感到被排除在工作场所之外，种族化群体感到在医疗服务中受到歧视。对我们来说，大流行的不平等也就不足为奇了，即使我们希望迅速组织起来帮助解决和解释它们。我们还可以从不同国家的政治组织和互助的有据可查的例子中汲取灵感，不仅是对“社区”的平淡庆祝，而且还可以通过非常实际的例子，如社区支持和变性倡导的 QueerCare 协议。与此同时，

我们期待着阅读更多我们知道正在进行的许多研究，其中一些快速反应资金已经授予或正在筹备中，并通过该杂志与我们的读者一起参与关于大流行的辩论，包括其社交媒体活动，以及上面推荐的其他平台，它们共同构成了我们的医学社会学社区。