An Abandonment Of An Abandonment: Public Health At The End Of Empire / Rob Wallace
Photo by Mstyslav Chernov under CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED
Rob Wallace—evolutionary epidemiologist, agroecologist, and author of Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19—joins me to discuss the complex interplay between the increase in infectious pathogens globally, the role of epidemiology within the neoliberal capitalist project, agribusiness and ecological destruction, and Empire at the end of the "cycle of accumulation" in late-stage capitalism. We reference his large body of work, but in particular two of his most recent Patreon pieces, A Spray of Split Seconds and Vic Berger's American Public Health.
Zoonotic pathogen spillover into human populations is on the upward trend. The high-speed evisceration of the last remaining intact biodiverse regions on the planet, in conjunction with agribusiness’s rapacious exploitation of biological life, meets the conditions for highly contagious viruses to evolve and leap from animal to human hosts more successfully and frequently. Regarding this epidemiological reality, Rob Wallace is an archetypal Cassandra, having predicted a pandemic emerging under current conditions as only a matter of time. As we know all know, he was right. SARS-CoV-2 emerged at the very end of 2019 in Wuhan, China, and over the course of almost two years, has killed millions of human beings as it continues to mutate and burn its way through the global population, disrupting practically every governing system of human life in the process. We have entered into an age of pandemics. Unless a massive shift occurs in the global economic order (be it systemic collapse or revolution, you pick), the idea of a global pandemic only occurring every 100 years or so, and not every one to two decades (or less), would be delusional.
And so, when we think about how to prevent mass death from virulent pathogenic spillover, what works? What doesn’t work? As Wallace has sharply critiqued in his extensive work, the efforts to mitigate and contain the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and its multiple variants has varied widely nation by nation. The United States has been lacking, to say the least. After almost two years of living with this thing, nearly three-quarters of a million people have died from Covid-19. And while it may be easy to blame the negligent response from the Trump Administration as the sole factor in this nation’s poor response, as Wallace points to emphatically, Joe Biden’s Administration hasn’t fared much better, either.
What must be made clear here is how the multiple layers of Public Health has been largely abandoned in nation states like the United States. The heavy reliance on vaccines to mitigate the worst of the pandemic is myopic to the point of being profoundly absurd, and will likely backfire as the virus works its way around the efficaciousness of the vaccines. The only ones to benefit in this situation are those that hold intellectual property rights over the vaccines, namely pharmaceutical companies. The Global South has little to no access to these vaccines, due to the “profits over people” model of intellectual property currently practiced by the capitalist epicenters in the Global North. By abandoning Public Health on the national, and global, scale, many nations, like the US, are practically guaranteeing this virus will be with us for a very long time.
Video Segment:
Bio:
Rob Wallace is an agroecologist, economic geographer and evolutionary epidemiologist at the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps in St Paul. He is author of Big Farms Make Big Flu and the recently published Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19. He has consulted for the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Episode Notes:
Support Rob Wallace’s work on Patreon
Learn more about Pandemic Research for the People (PReP)
Purchase his books Big Farms Make Big Flu and Dead Epidemiologists at Bookshop
Music produced by Epik The Dawn
Photo by Mstyslav Chernov under CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED
