There are failures in the pandemic, states the editorial,1 that could have been handled better if learnings from previous viral breakouts and institutional racism were followed through, but which still recur in the possibility of a future albeit informed failure. This possibility can be posited even amidst the heightened awareness and the prevailing zugzwang2 that ties the current management of ‘glocal’ health organization to tendencies of persistent systematic exploitations and instrumentalizations. If there are lessons to be learned in making-kin (‘sympoesis’) via assemblages that forward an ongoing dynamics of co-adaptation,3 it would have to be a mode of existence that provides potential normativity for resistance.