Doctor Death and Coronavirus: Supplicating Santa Muerte for Holy Healing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Human beings have long turned to religion and faith healing to overcome illness and seek to delay death. In the context of the COVID‑19 pandemic, I consider how in Mexico, devotees of Santa Muerte are turning to the folk saint of death to ward off and recover from the virus. I argue that supplication of Santa Muerte during times of coronavirus offers a social critique on the current context in Mexico. The government has introduced budget cuts, reducing spending during this pandemic, and failed to provide adequate measures to protect already vulnerable citizens living in poverty and within the grips of the drug war, from COVID‑19. Frontline workers are labouring in unsafe conditions with inadequate protective equipment and protocols. As a result, the death toll has risen rapidly. Mexico is currently listed as having the fourth highest death rate. I describe how fearing death, many have turned to the saint of death for recovery from coronavirus and to prolong life. My argument also counters the popular portrayal of Santa Muerte as a narcosaint, that is to say a saint solely venerated by narcotraffickers. Instead, I reveal that she is a saint of healing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".