Combating COVID-19: Pandemics, Power and Profits

By SETH SANDRONSKY

Epidemiologist Rob Wallace and contributors question the status quo in “The Fault in Our SARS: COVID-19 in the Biden Era” (Monthly Review Press, 2023). The book features 16 essays and just over 100 pages of notes that explore pandemic responses under the current US president and his indicted predecessor.

Here is a taste of what readers will find in an essay published after Biden’s election over Trump. “Any righteous effort to control the outbreak would pay everyone to stay home for as long as a year, even should the two leading vaccine candidates prove efficacious,” Wallace writes. What prevented that outcome? Spoiler alert: profits first, people last.

“For a virulently capitalist state,” according to him, “however, such a reserve army of labor is allowed to fallow only so far as it disciplines those millions who are forced to work to survive, including during a dangerous outbreak.” In other words, unemployment serves a crucial function. It disciplines the employed to demand less in terms of benefits and wages from their employers.

Avoidable US COVID deaths were and are a necessary outcome, unfortunately. This outcome was and is a predicted and predictable metric in a society where it is easier to buy a gun than obtain health care.

We turn to “To Live and Die in LA,” a dispatch from Wallace, the PReP Neighborhoods working group for Pandemic Research for the People, Meleiza Figueroa, Kaitlin Enouchs, Miguel Tinsay, Tanya Kerssena, Allison Henry, Fernando Ramirez, David Bond and John Gulick. The authors reveal neighborhoods’ push back against pandemic responses around the systemic failure to protect poor and working people from evictions and foreclosures.

In “Vic Berger’s American Public Health,” Wallace unpacks the Biden administration’s callous undoing of COVID policies to address transmission of the pandemic. One example is reversal of the mask mandate. “It’s as mendacious a decision as anything the mass murders of the previous administration undertook,” according to Wallace. There are other examples that he terms the “Swiss cheese model of public health.”

Wallace interrogates land use such as industrial farming. That is where zoonotic diseases can emerge. This process bodes ill for human health.

In “Governance is Key,” Wallace proposes solutions to combatting current and future pandemics. “Governance must pivot back to supporting modes of production such as agroecology, community-controlled forestry, and open medicine that, on the front end of disease emergence, retard new pathogens from spilling over into human populations and, on the back end, place public health and economic development on mutually supportive trajectories.” Imagine that!

In the book’s final essay, Wallace and his fellow scribes take up the ideas and practices of land use and pandemics further. This is not breaking news. They write, “Over the past two decades, long before the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists increasingly attributed the emergence of new pathogens and reemergence of other diseases to land use change—the process of converting a specific area of land to another.” If that sounds benign, think again.

At the end of the day, we have a lot of work to control and prevent pandemics. Reading “The Fault in Our SARS: COVID-19 in the Biden Era” is a useful place to begin.

Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2023

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