asylum regime where particular vulnerabilities have become crucial criteria for admitting or rejecting people who seek asylum (Sozer, 2020). These mainly concern the role of medical certificates as necessary evidence, as Didier Fassin (2011) has convincingly shown, to get a temporary authorisation to stay and access to rights in EUrope: thus, the proof that “one’s life was threatened by the existence of a disease” counts more than the proof of being persecuted (Fassin, 2018: 59). While both these medical technologies of governmentality are largely at stake in refugee camps, medical vulnerabilities are far from being guarantees for international protection, which means that asylum-seekers, like those stuck in the Moria hotspot, become stranded in (semi-)carceral conditions in which their psychological and physical vulnerabilities increase further. For instance, being considered “highly vulnerable” by the Greek authorities and by the European Asylum Office (EASO) has been for a while now the only way in which asylum-seekers on the Greek islands could have their geographical restrictions lifted (Spathopoulou and Carasthathis, 2020).xiii However, nowadays vulnerability as such is no longer a sufficient condition for getting protection or for being allowed to move from the Greek islands to the mainland. In fact, “the Greek government refuses to set clear criteria for being moved to Athens, and this paradoxically happens while people in the hotspots are exposed to the pandemic.”xiv In this respect it is worth noting that the New EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, presented by the EU Commission in the midst of the pandemic, establishes mandatory “health and vulnerability checks” to be done by member states on migrants. While it is unclear what these health and vulnerability checks will consist of, these checks will practically entail that people seeking asylum will be confined at the border for days before receiving a decision whether they would be allowed to legally enter the territory or not. Thus, health and vulnerability checks contribute to strengthen the exclusionary borders of asylum. In order to better unfold our argument about the hygienic-sanitary borders, it is important to dwell upon the meaning and use of “hygienic” as such. Here we build on Michel Foucault’s definition of hygiene as “as a regime for the health of populations” (Foucault, 2014: 120). In Abnormal (1974-1975) Foucault remarkably draws attention to the function of public hygiene and social protection performed by psychiatry since the late eighteenth century. Together with the medicalisation of madness, psychiatry also functioned “as a specialized branch of public hygiene [... ] as a particular domain of social protection” (Foucault, 2003a: 118). In fact, public hygiene became about preventing all factors that might be “endangering public safety” (141). Similarly, in Society must be Defended (1976-1977), Foucault shows that the task of public hygiene has historically been at the core of medical knowledge (Foucault, 18