The Fault In Our SARS: Scientism, The People's CDC, & The Weight Of Virus Origin Stories / Rob Wallace
Evolutionary epidemiologist and author Rob Wallace returns to the podcast to discuss his new collection, The Fault in Our SARS: COVID-19 in the Biden Era, published through Monthly Review.
This discussion is long, but certainly worth a listen. Entering year four of the pandemic, Rob Wallace has diligently, and extensively, written two books worth of essays on the various facets of the SARS-2 outbreak, many of which are examined in this interview. Rob skewers the Biden administration’s political, institutional, and rhetorical approach to the BSL-3 [Biosafety Level 3] pathogen’s burn through the population, picking apart the scientism, employed by both the political elite and their media lackeys to rationalize and normalize the mass death and disability of millions.
Considering the dystopian realism the parasitic capitalist class is bringing to bear, what does collective care and radical organizing look like in this time? There are numerous manifestations, but one worthy of note is the People’s CDC, “a coalition of public health practitioners, scientists, healthcare workers, educators, advocates and people from all walks of life working to reduce the harmful impacts of COVID-19.” Wallace, in his capacities as a trained evolutionary epidemiologist, is the public face and voice of COVID This Week, a freely available, weekly released video series that coalesces pandemic data, medical research, and public health policy analyses, published on the organization’s website and YouTube channel. I ask Wallace how this collective endeavor began, why it exists in the first place, its strengths and weaknesses, and its growing and continued relevance in our current moment.
I ask Wallace to lay out the complex reality and geopolitical implications of the various theories and hypotheses of the coronavirus’s origins. Each strain of these origin stories of the pandemic carry a certain weight, and deserve a fair hearing, which, in my opinion, Wallace does deftly and carefully. And finally, with the specter of more zoonotic spillover events in the near and distant future, I ask him: What does the abandonment of the population to the SARS-2 virus portend for other spillover events on the horizon?
Bio:
Rob Wallace is an agroecologist, economic geographer and evolutionary epidemiologist at the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps in St Paul. He is the author of Big Farms Make Big Flu; Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19; and The Fault in Our SARS: COVID-19 in the Biden Era. He has consulted for the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Episode Notes:
Purchase a copy of The Fault in Our Sars at Bookshop.
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The music featured is by Waxie.
This transcript was originally released in two parts on the Last Born in the Wildnerness Substack.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH We were just talking about when you were on the podcast last in 2021 and thinking about the specific events occurring around that time—I think mask mandates were being lifted nationwide. I get confused about the timeline. Whether you are experiencing the effects of Long COVID (millions of people are experiencing it now, having memory issues as a result), or just the fact of existing in a pandemic, makes it hard to remember when things happened. It’s a phenomenon that I’m sure has been studied over the centuries when we've had plagues in the past. I don't remember when certain things happened.
ROB WALLACE Yes, it reminds me of China Miéville's short story about people who can move really fast, and describes being inside an explosion and seeing it happening, not in real time, but slowed down to the point people can get out. I think that's what we're experiencing: an ongoing years-long emergency that has us all on edge and upset about things, and rightfully so. And at the same time, as anyone puts on their fight or flight suit, as it were, and so worried, it has a way of undercutting our capacity to keep track of things because other things are more important, like the dangers and upset that's come about. The country was really upset before when Trump was elected—there's an ongoing divide, people are outraged— and then to have it compounded by a global pandemic screws up people's sense of order, predictability, and expectation. That's my take on it.
FARNSWORTH This is something I talk about with my partner. We're both very cautious—in fact, we've gotten more cautious.
I was just reflecting on how I bought into some of the sentiments around vaccination as being like a panacea, the thing that was going to make it, so I, a vaccinated person, the virtuous one, can go out and be among the public. "The pandemic is over for us." I remember a brief period where I wasn't wearing masks, but luckily in that timeframe, I didn't get COVID.
I want to comment on the moment we're in when you're releasing this new book: I read an article from Time that was so explicit, asking, "What are we going to do about all these people still cautious around COVID? They should just get infected and move on.” It was arguing a pandemic is a socially agreed phenomena—not an epidemiological and material thing as much as what we collectively agree is real. With the pandemic, we can decide it is over. I read those articles to know what the mainstream publications are really pushing, but it feels so blatant. Now that we're entering into a period of forced normalization around mass disability, death, and ongoing illness in the population, it's really hard for me to stomach. As a result, it's made my partner and me more cautious and intentional in setting boundaries around how we engage with the public.
WALLACE Yes, there's a cost to be paid for going upon one's own path. But, at the same time, if I've gotten more cautious, it's only in part because I have to do a quasi-weekly program, COVID This Week for the People's CDC. I repeatedly have to report on the latest scientific evidence on the nature of COVID-19 and the virus itself. And even as an epidemiologist, I can't keep track of everything, but it's remarkable the waves of new data coming in regarding the truly dangerous aspect of COVID-19, in ways that when we first had our interview in 2021, nobody really knew anything other than there was a lot of people dying. Fewer people are dying now, but it's becoming apparent that many deaths will be on the far end of an infection. So, it's not about the acute infection in the first 25 days—although 25 days is a long time for an acute infection. Health and Human Services estimates about 36 million Americans have some version of Long COVID. My vision of what COVID is has shifted from an acute infection that can kill people to having some tail end, long-term impacts on some people. Upon Omicron, it switched in the other direction—I think of it less as an acute infection, but more like a long term chronic condition at this point. For organ systems, the amount of damage that accumulates is extraordinary. And that's certainly made me much more cautious.
I'm as much an American anybody else: I want to flee all this, I'm tired of all this, too. But, I am still wearing masks in a sensibly liberal democratic neighborhood here in St. Paul, in which everyone's back in the café, much along the lines you described. They've been good public health citizens: "I've got my vaccine, I'm all in the clear." But as we've learned, vaccines certainly will help keep you from getting the worst of an infection or dying from it, but it's no guarantee. Think of Colin Powell, who was up to speed on his vaccines and was killed by COVID. It's more of a statistical protection rather than a categorical one: if you vaccinate, it doesn't mean you're in the clear and not going to get infected. In fact, the viruses are evolving out from underneath our vaccines, Paxlovid, and all the other antivirals—there isn't a single monoclonal antibody that works here in the United States anymore.
So, we're really at a point where deaths seem to be going down, but at the same time, many states are no longer reporting in—our statistical infrastructure is in rapid decline. It is more similar to what you describe of a desire to have the pandemic over, and therefore, we're going to declare it so, rather than any notion of where the actual virus actually is. It speaks to the how of the logic of fantasy is imprinted upon the logic of production in a way that getting people back to work is much more important than the well-being and health of the American people.
FARNSWORTH Yes, it's pretty naked, too. Anthony Fauci was talking about the decision to change the recommendation of time to quarantine after a positive test: originally, if COVID positive, you should, at the minimum, stay away from other people for about 10 days. That's more scientifically based. Instead, they changed it to five days, with some caveats: if you're still infectious, you should wear a mask and go back to work—if we don't do this, the economy will collapse and society will fall apart, which speaks more to how poorly our society is constructed, rather than what should be done to protect people's health. It's really quite astounding.
"Declaring independence from the virus”—it reminds me of when George W. Bush was president, landing his jet on that aircraft carrier and making his victory speech in front of a big banner stating "Mission Accomplished.” The war in Iraq was just really beginning; the reaction to the US's occupation and brutalization of the people of Iraq was just starting. And yet, they can declare it over.
The same thing seems to be happening rhetorically with the pandemic—we can just say it's over. It's obviously not. I remember when your new book, The Fault in Our SARS, was being promoted by your publisher, Monthly Review. As expected with anything being promoted around COVID, somebody had commented in response, "Jesus Christ, are we done with this yet? Can we just stop talking about this?"
We're all just as tired as you are. It doesn't change the reality of what's happening. To act from a place of being informed, but also compassionate towards one another, requires going against the grain in many cases.
How is it going regarding your advocacy, and for the others you're working with right now, with the People's CDC? I've heard from others, and have read comments, this is one of the few sources that presents concentrated, clear, and concise information on COVID, as well as making broader connections. How are you and everyone else involved in this organization faring in this environment?
WALLACE The beginning of your question, and the actual question itself, are very much connected to each other.
The CDC declared back in December 2021, as you were describing, you no longer had to quarantine yourself with infection for 10 days, but instead, down to five. The 10-day isolation policy is based on the viral dynamics of SARS-2. Although many infections happen in the first five days, there's that tail going off 10 days and beyond, with scientific reports that followed up showing people still testing positive on rapid tests at 14 or 15 days, post first symptom. Epidemiologically, if you just send people back in after five days, a good portion of those people are still going to be infectious.
In essence, they are saying there are things more important than people's health, like keeping the economy running. When we speak about the economy, we're speaking about keeping the employers side of things and profits going—we can't have a situation where we're not in the business of producing billionaires. So, you need to get back to work. That, of course, does not apply to even the very scientists involved who pontificated on this.
In The Fault in Our SARS, I describe how a reporter from the Washington Post Magazine got COVID and didn't want to get Anthony Fauci infected, who she was interviewing. So, she reached out to his people and said, "I'll be in the clear in 10 days—I can show up, right?" Fauci got back to her and said, "Yes, you can show up, but you're going to be wearing a mask, too, and we're doing this interview outside." In other words, all the attributes that are good enough for Fauci are not good enough for the American people. There's a true divide. Rochelle Walensky’s [CDC Director] office all throughout the pandemic, until recently, met remotely. Nobody goes near the President of the United States without being tested first. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, there was a high level of testing and protection, with everybody wearing N95 masks and using UV lights—all sorts of things that, frankly, are not to be given to not just the American people, but people elsewhere in the world. You are a lower class, not just economically, but epidemiologically and as a human being. "We're counseling you have to do these things, while we have no interest in doing them ourselves."
This is what set off the People's CDC. Everybody knew Trump was hideous and awful—this is what distinguishes my first COVID book, Dead Epidemiologists that came out in October 2020, released ten months into the pandemic, from The Fault in Our SARS in February 2023, released 38 months into the pandemic. There's a vast difference between those two points. In October 2020, Trump sucks. Liberals and leftists—we all hate him. We're all bunkered down for the most part, and not quite sure of all the details of COVID. It's not fun at all. Certainly, at 38 months, it's not fun at all, either, but it's mostly turned into a shitshow. Now, everybody's an expert at COVID. Part of it is living through a pandemic, I don't take that away from them—expertise comes in all sorts of different packages. But, where we're at now is also a hideous moment in that regard. You have the worst reports, like one first authored by an Oxford educated COVID denialist saying masking didn't do anything, which completely contradicts the entirety of much of the public health literature, both pre- and post-COVID. Suddenly, it's splashed on every page around the country. Much in the way the Department of Energy report is presently saying COVID originated as a lab leak in China—it deems itself as a low confidence in terms of its conclusion, and yet it's splashed on pages around the US as the done deal as far as the origins of it goes.
So, we had the 10 days cut to five, and it was such an outrage to public health people. I mean, this was a moment in where, along with what differentiates my first book from the second, is that liberals are basically divided. There are some good liberals still very much understanding the nature of the virus and the necessity of public health, and there are other liberals that are going to follow Biden through hell—they don't care. "Biden: whatever he says is true." So, even if Biden returns to exactly the position Trump took, which we all voted against, then it's okay.
As far as all the things have gone down in the pandemic, there are some really horrible, hideous things that have happened, some of them ridiculously funny. I remember the ivermectin folks who were willing to take suppositories in their butt—it's stupid, hideous, awful, and very funny.
For the most part, I don't oppose people who didn't get vaccinated. It's not their fault. The failure to vaccinate is also a failure of access. In the United States, the public health apparatus was responsible for going door to door, whether in cities or farm to farm, to try to convince people to be vaccinated. They refused to do that. Instead, they spun it off as some sort of individualistic intervention. That's not public health at all. Not only did public health suffer as a pragmatic thing, but it's suffered in a way that we've gotten to the point the things by which we joined society together have been undercut.
My heart mourns for the 1.1 million Americans who died, whether I agree with them politically, or not. It's a hideous, horrible thing. And as someone in public health, it weighs on you, and should weigh on you. That's not the case for a whole number of other public health folk who have basically thrown in with Biden and are selling out the American people, in the sense of that their deaths now are considered to be absolutely appropriate. Leana Wen comes to mind, the former Baltimore Department of Health Commissioner now writing for The Washington Post. Other people, like Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota, who has continued to say it's still kind of dangerous, but at the same time talks about hoping to move in a direction where people are infected twice a year by COVID-19. I think what he's getting at is, hopefully, the virus will become like a cold or influenza, but repeatedly makes the mistake he's in a position to direct SARS-2's evolution. There are many people who are more interested in connecting to presidential power than public health.
Okay, I am going to answer your question. It gets back to 2021, we're down from 10 days to five days. It was such an outrage to public health folks, that a bunch of us began to organize on a listserv called The Spirit of 1848, and a number of radical public health practitioners and liberals out of the American Public Health Association had our first meeting. There was a line in the sand: this was not going to be able to continue, and we have reached a moment where the CDC does not have the interests of the people. We're going to establish, in January 2022, the People’s CDC. Now, that whole thing is an outrage, you're not supposed to have a People's CDC: the CDC is supposed to be the people's CDC. And, I want to be clear, part of what my book is about is reconstructing history that has been totally lost.
If we remember correctly why the CDC decided to change the isolation time from 10 days to five, it was based on a letter that was sent to them by the CEO of Delta Air Lines requesting this change—it's a two-page letter and makes little reference to the scientific literature. However, the president of the Infectious Diseases Society, Carlos del Rio, signed off on it—he didn't sign it as president of the association, but instead as a paid consultant of Delta Air Lines. It really speaks to the extent to which public health can be corrupted and bought. So, they sent a letter about changing it from 10 days to five, and in a matter of a week, that's precisely what happened. It really speaks to the power of employers to be able to get their needs met, even if it sends hundreds of thousands to their deaths. There are things more important than people's well-being.
So, we set up the People CDC and began to meet every week. I started giving COVID This Week updates about where we were. We weren't getting that anywhere from any government source. There's no sense of where we are with this pandemic, other than to declare the pandemic over. There's no sense of daily or weekly reports about what was going on. It ended up being spun off as its own broadcast, and we launched a weather report every week, providing updates about what COVID was doing and what you should be doing as well.
The People CDC has public health professionals and medical doctors, but also everyday people: retired nurses, teachers, firefighters, occupational hazard people—different people from different parts of the country getting together every week to talk about it in a serious way. But more importantly, the People's CDC is largely driven by its working groups, which are getting things done, like all sorts of reports, but also connecting people trying to show up for community organizations that need someone to fill them in about where we are with COVID, offering, for example, easy to read programs for how to hold a party in this time of COVID. We're not killjoys interested in cutting people off. On the contrary, it is important for people to get together, but if you do, let's do these things to make sure nobody gets infected and shows up infected, if that is at all is possible. That's been going on every week, for over a year now.
To me, it's been a delightful experience. Not everybody agrees about everything—there are strong opinions and disagreements about the nature of things, but people are serious about putting those differences aside to get this work done because of the damage that's accumulating in people's health and well-being.
It's remarkable how successful it's been in terms of reach. We're a small organization, not a $12 billion agency like the CDC—although much of that money is supposed to go back to the states and cities, but we don't have thousands of employees. It’s remarkable that we've been, in essence, able to punch above our weight and to get this position and out there. And, as you described, I think people have been very responsive to it the notion that there is someone speaking for their interests that hasn't abandoned them. I think that constituency is much larger than the press and the government is pretending it is.
I understand why people are exhausted, but poll after poll has shown that if the administration or CDC moves in the direction to recommending masking, many Americans would do that–they're following the lead. I think you pointed this out: once the announcement was that if you are vaccinated, you don't need masks, you took it as your point of departure. It’s totally understandable. Who has time to go through all the literature and keep track of things? And if the scientists at CDC say it's okay, then I utterly understand why the American people would go in that direction. But, it has led, unfortunately, to hundreds of thousands of deaths by virtue of our failure to do this.
Maybe we'll talk about China later, but I'll end with this point: China left "Zero COVID" this past year, but "Zero COVID" protected their country, as difficult as the cumulating anger and upset about it was. If China had as many people die as we have, proportionately, they would have lost 4.6 million Chinese if they did it our way. They consider governance the health and well-being of their own people. And not just China, you had other countries like New Zealand, Vietnam, Iceland, Uruguay, all making efforts that first year and a half to try to protect their people from a deadly disease. And subsequently, that all fell apart.
FARNSWORTH The People's CDC, by its very nature, certainly stands in opposition to the cynicism of something like the actual CDC and how it operates. But, I imagine a limitation is you are basing your weekly reports off data that's being accumulated by various states, counties, and from the CDC itself. Even though they did change the community guidance around what is considered safe transmission levels, which is obviously done as a way to normalize COVID infection, the data is still available, you just have to know where to look.
What are the limitations of the People's CDC? What do you hope for as you move forward, as these limitations continue to get in the way of having a clearer vision of what's happening around us? Can there be developments in certain directions that can make up for that? I'm curious what the vision is for the future of this organization.
WALLACE We are happy that we've continued this far. No one had any illusions about whether this would continue. Would there be infighting? Would there just be exhaustion, whether it be the notion of giving up like much of our establishment public health system? There's no guarantee anything will continue. I go back to the Black Panthers or the Young Lords—they were around for a few years, that's it, but had a maximum impact on our imagination and our notions of what could be possible in terms of community response to health crises.
COVID This Week depends on a lot of data from CDC and the states, and you do have to know where to look through and pull out the data away from the CDC version of it. The one they put out, the Community Levels map, basically shows the country entirely green: "Go outside, no problem." They also have a Community Transmission map which is largely red: "Stay inside." The Community Levels map is based on hospitalizations and Community Transmissions based on transmission and COVID testing. All that data is starting to crumble—it’s like looking at a portrait with the wax face starting to melt, but you can still see the face enough. So, that's our objective: data is crumbling, but we still want to get the bigger picture about where the state of things is. We are walking on the edge of a knife in terms of what we can show.
The whole point of the People CDC is to try to direct attention toward the ways that a fundamental federal agency should be acting. We don't oppose the scientists at CDC, thousands of people there understand. We've gotten word from people working on the inside that they appreciate what we're doing. They know what we're after. We're not here for the destruction of CDC. We oppose the leadership of CDC and the way it's been handled, and we oppose the White House in terms of how it treats the CDC as its pool boy to wash up political problems rather than actually deal with concrete realities of a BSL-3 disease that can kill in short order or in the long term.
As for what's next, we show up every week and got work to do. We do get together every once in a while and think about the big picture of what we can do and where we're at. That is part of our strategic planning. It might be that COVID will peter out, and we'll be done with this and can stop what we're doing. It might be this continues on, and we might decide that 500 deaths a week is still not reasonable and continue to work that way. It's an open-ended thing. Where it goes depends on where the virus goes, where the American people are, and where we are.
We continue to get wonderful feedback from large numbers of people. We just set up a letter to President Biden and Congress demanding they reverse their likely decision to end the Public Health Emergency, which would throw 15 million people off Medicaid, reduce Telehealth for older people—a number of things would end. And also, it would be the declaration of the pandemic is over, even though people continue to die. We had a letter that tens of thousands of people signed off on, so there is a constituency of people upset about this.
It doesn't matter what is said about the push that you and other people have felt, the notion “this is over” bared upon us by articles that named us in the specific that we are out of our minds, a ragtag team. I think of Emma Green's article in The New Yorker at the end of last year, a hideous piece that actually blew up in her face. It underscored exactly the thing that you brought out, this pressure to pretend this is over, when the fact people will continue to get sick is a sickness unto itself. We had all sorts of volunteers after that article was published.
Again, we take the view that, where this ends up, we're not certain. Things are not cut in stone, not just in terms of the politics, but the epidemiology of it. It truly speaks to this notion that we are in some sort of endemic phase, where you can predict what strains go where and how many people will be infected. It's completely not true, at all, for SARS-2.
When I think of endemicity, I think of the seasonal influenza. I used to work with Walter Fitch at the University of California, Irvine, one of the fathers of modern phylogeny. He and his team did some amazing work in the late 1990s, showing if you had influenza strains in one season that had the most evolution at 18 codons, they were going to likely serve as the progenitor of the strain that comes next year. Now, that's a level of prediction in detail of what's going to happen next year as far as seasonal influenza. It certainly helps with the flu vaccine, which I recommend, but also doesn't always work. But that's a level of predictability that we are nowhere near with SARS-2 in terms of how the virus is likely to evolve, how it's going to interact with our population, and with immunity as far as what combination of vaccination and natural infection we can stumble together at this point.
To end this point, Omicron has a reputation of being less deadly—that might be more due to levels of vaccination and natural infection—but if you let Omicron rip, it will kill people. SARS-2 basically punches through your nose into your brain; Omicron doesn't punch like the previous variants, causing considerable damage in your respiratory tract and leading to all sorts of potentials for death, but it kind of wiggles its way through our nose and attacks particular segments of the brain around coordination in language, killing particular brain cells and reducing blood flow to parts of your brain. My point is, we are confusing a particular moment with how it's going to happen, and we've made that mistake time and time again, where we entered a valley in the epidemiology of the virus and use that as a declaration that this is over. We act surprised, again and again, that the virus wasn't bending in the direction of our hopes and wishes, and is actually evolving in the direction that most benefits itself.
FARNSWORTH I am speaking as someone who is a total layman. I'm curious, I like to read, I like to understand things, and I like to talk to people like yourself. I like to recognize what people's intentions are in the so-called expertise that they have.
This leads me to a question I have around scientism, written about in your book. This is an issue where we say, “Just trust the science and scientists; they have all the information, and know what they're doing.” And yes, certainly science is an ever-changing, evolving field. We should all expect that science, as a discipline and practice, is going to discover new things and incorporate it into our worldview of how we understand reality and make decisions. That's all true. And yet, there is this aspect of science where it acts an institution and serves certain socioeconomic and political interests.
You encountered this early on in your career, it seems, and it’s what made you stand apart. It defined your work in contrast to so many other epidemiologists and others studying disease, by asking: “What are the forces that are actually producing the conditions that are leading to outbreaks of certain viruses?” This goes all the way back to your first collection with Monthly Review, Big Farms Make Big Flu.
To get to the point of my question about scientism, I think people need to have this in their vocabulary and understand what's actually happening here. Because like we were describing the People's CDC in contrast to the CDC and its leaders, there is a gulf. You’re working with the same data, more or less, but the ways in which that data is used are so different. It's almost like we're talking about two entirely different realities.
Could just describe what scientism is and how you explore this concept through your critique of how science is used in service to global capitalism, ultimately?
WALLACE Scientism is the excess of belief in the capacity of science and its techniques, to the point that it's basically deployed to rationalize directions that don't necessarily have a scientific bent to them. Or, if they do have a scientific bent, it's not the only thing going on.
I think of the example of my parents, Deborah and Roderick Wallace. In the 1970s, they pushed back against the Rand Institute that was doing some modeling for the New York City. The models basically said, “We can reduce the number of a fire and ladder companies in minority neighborhoods and remove them, and if there's a fire, we'll be able to use this model to reorient what fire companies are available to cover what's missing.” Of course, it was completely disastrous and burnt down many black and brown neighborhoods. But, if you go to the various public meetings about this, the very scientists there would basically say, "You don't understand this model, this is not what you're saying is going to happen." So, they were, in essence, hiding behind the equations and modeling to run cover for what was a political decision to undercut the Black and Brown neighborhoods and the voting blocks that would have, in essence, voted out the white power structure. That's my earliest encounter with this stuff.
In this case, as far as COVID goes, there is a liberal and leftist notion that science has its place in terms of describing material reality, whether to the extent to which it then acts as a kind of basis of values is an open question. On the one hand, we like to think, "We should wait to make a decision until we have some data and to decide what to do." But, sometimes you don't have that kind of timing. For the most part, generally, you should have some basis for your action.
Now, I'm not talking about people's day-to-day life, I'm talking about governments and decisions about what to do as a society. A decision to go to a movie and take the day off is because it's fun and has nothing to do with data—you might have some notions of whether you have enough cash. But, I'm talking about how science has to deal with collecting data to test hypotheses, and make decisions from that. The applicability of that is in play. The problem, then, is the science turns into scientism when it's just acts as a cover for making decisions that aren't based on any of that, or very little.
Trump tried to do that time and time again, when he was leaning on models that said things weren't all that bad anymore. It was so transparent, everyone was sick to their stomach. Fauci rolling his eyes on that account is entirely reasonable. But of course, we at the People's CDC were outraged when Fauci did the same thing in December 2021, when he said that we didn't need 10 days to isolate, and to go down to five days. There was no scientific basis for that. Emma Green in The New Yorker article tried to take the CDC's side and push back on me by saying, "Most infections are in the first five days," but that's not public health—public health is about populations and variation, not just averages. You need to know the extent of that tail—if you send that tail of people still infectious at 8–14 days, you're going to keep the outbreak continuing on. The whole point of isolating yourself is it breaks the chain of transmission. You do your part, It's not about you do you, it's about helping other people's health, and as a society, we will support you and send some cash to stay home and not infect anybody else.
There's a difference between individualistic notions of health and public health, which is each individual has to engage in this, but we're going to make sure that you're taking care of—we will bring you food, cash, and put a moratorium on your rent. I will make sure that you can do the things necessary to keep other people from being infected and thereby help the economy overall by allowing us to all go to work, not get sick and have to stay home even for the five days.
The scientism is what happens when Biden gets elected. He ran on the notion of science, that we're going to follow the scientists. In the first two essays in my book—the first is from November 2020, the second is from January 2021—I described the Biden plan and gave it a fair airing. There's a lot of bullshit in it, but they took the Rooseveltian notion of big government has its place at this moment, even though they're total neoliberals. They got off that as soon as possible. Instead, they're much better than Trump at using scientific cover to have us exit out of the public health program. The CDC declaring in May 2021, “If you're vaccinated, you don't need to mask,” at a time when all of us knew the Delta variant had emerged out of India and was coming for us. We have hundreds of thousand killed in India. We knew, and decided to make the same mistake Trump did in January 2020 when it emerged in China. It was going to come here, and sat on our hands and pretended this cannot happen to us—the worst of American exceptionalism. Then Biden did it again. Not learning from your mistakes, or not wanting mistakes to be considered mistakes, must be the standard mode of operation—you need to be able to send people to work however much it might hurt or kill them.
In one of the essays, there was a terrible joke about Yale University being a kind of mutual fund with a campus attached to it, and that the US is a stock market with a country attached to it. There are some things more important than the very country, even though all these politicians make appeals to patriotism, the United States, and the flag, but they have no problem killing more than a million Americans. I can't believe that nobody talks about that: you killed a million Americans, and now you want to shit on people who don't want that to happen anymore, and do so in the notion of those of us who don't want more Americans to die are anti-American. That gets to your point about how things are so flipped around, that the logic of fantasy comes front and center.
FARNSWORTH Speaking to the way time feels warped under the blanket of a pandemic, it also feels, as this proceeds, this is the worst time of the pandemic. For those of us that are still doing this, you could say gaslighting is high: we are being told we are fucking crazy—literally, with more words than that. It really comes down to: "Are you crazy? Stop being crazy."
I just don't know how to talk to most people about it without eyes glazing over. It's a difficult thing. It's a difficult environment to do the kind of work that you're doing with People's CDC, where, again, releasing a second large collection of writings about the pandemic in the midst of it is eliciting eye rolls, unfortunately. But, at a certain point, you wonder if we’re only speaking to people that get it, and it's hard to convert people over to this other side, so to speak, and convince people we should pick up these mitigation tactics and protections again. Much of the time when I hear people doing this, it is because they have been personally afflicted and affected by COVID and have their assumptions and worldview shaken by it.
I imagine a challenging aspect of being in this position is not only trying to speak to those that already understand the situation well enough, but to those that don’t as well.
WALLACE On a personal level, from me to you, I would say something along the lines of: You don't want to get infected with this thing. The more infections you have, the more likely you'll get into Long COVID, with terrible damage. I do this, I keep my head down. I want my kid healthy and clear. I do have my professional impulses and obligations with the People's CDC and otherwise to say things, but on a personal level, I'm not getting this again. The accumulation of damage is so gruesome.
The notion that any of us have any understanding about what risk we're at is completely off the wall. Yes, those who are immunocompromised are more likely to have suffered Long COVID. But many a healthy person has gone down in flames—they get it once, they're fine; they get it twice, no big deal; come third or fourth time, they're suffering badly. The data, in terms of the accumulation of it, under all different vaccination statuses, increases the likelihood of getting terrible Long COVID. And, getting Long COVID is like dropping into a hole that you can't get out of. There’s no help for you. The medical system doesn't know what to do with you, they can't even identify that you have it. As far as the gaslighting goes, the gruesome aspect of being told, back in the days of Lyme disease where nobody knew what it was or even believed it existed, Long Covid is ten orders of magnitude worse.
So on a personal level, I'd say keep your head down and do the best you can to get through a period of time in our country's existence that we'll look back on in astonishment, and not in a good way. You let a virus rip through your population, you let kids get it—more kids have died than we'd like to admit. But what's going to happen in the next 10–20 years when they start accumulating their own comorbidities? How's COVID going to react to that?
Here are some of the things I've learned in the past couple months: COVID infections continue on, up to a year, maybe more, after you first get it. So, let's say you have an acute infection; you do 25 days, you're done. But, it’s still circulating and replicating in you. They have done autopsies where they looked through the body parts of people infected a year ago, now on a slab for other reasons, detecting active replication of COVID-19 in different parts of the body. These are people, even after being refrigerated for about 12 days, get pulled out, and on the 13th day, they're still finding active replication of the virus.
So, you're doing this to kids, they're getting infected, maybe not as bad. But what happens when they get older? What happens when the rough and tough of life starts to accumulate, as it does to all of us? We will all end up being susceptible or immunocompromised, whether early or later in life. We don't know what we did to our kids, we have no clue, and we don't care because they're not dying in the short term. That quite a risk that we’re choosing.
In the scope of things, a couple of bad years having to batten down the hatch while we figured out what this thing is probably would have been a good exercise of the precautionary principle. Again, there are things more important. After 9/11, America's Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the first thing you need to do is go shop. So, it's clear what's more important than your well-being.
FARNSWORTH There are many layers to this, but I want to discuss two essays in The Fault in Our SARS that explore the origins of COVID-19. I know there's more than just two hypotheses, but they generally fit into two camps: first is the field hypothesis, which posits a zoonotic virus spilled over into human populations, and then became contagious among human beings—this is the most generally accepted theory; and the second is the lab leak hypothesis, which is the idea that a virology lab in Wuhan, China had a hot agent, SARS-CoV-2, and it somehow, whether purposefully or not, got into a human being and spilled out into the population.
It's all well and good to be curious about where the virus came from. Certainly, it's of concern we have virology labs around the world that may have these types of accidents. It's similar to nuclear waste, with all the numerous facilities storing nuclear waste we need to keep track of. But, it's not just about whether it came from a lab or not, it also has numerous geopolitical implications.
On one level, when you mentioned earlier that China lifted its “Zero COVID” policies—the same US publications were saying, "China's crazy, what are they doing? This is awful, it's authoritarian and tyranny," and then as soon as they lift pandemic restrictions, they respond, "Oh, shit—China's has the largest population in the world, and now all of a sudden, everyone can get infected, and who knows what the implications are for the rest of us." This sort of cognitive dissonance is interesting to see play out.
But, regarding China specifically, now we're seeing all these reports that the lab leak is really what happened. In The Fault in Our SARS, you go through the scientific literature and the evidence, and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each of these hypotheses. But it's not just about that, there's a brewing Cold War conflict between the US and China, and where this virus originates has geopolitical implications. Could you talk about the nature of this discussion around the origins of the virus?
WALLACE Yes. So like much of my book, The Fault in Our SARS has some essays that are short and direct to the public, and there are others where I’m trying to think through things and are more scientifically laden. The two essays on the origins of COVID-19 are me trying to make my way through the various hypotheses. As you described, they are more than two. And then the there's a third class of essays in this, where I came to the realization that this was not just about the virus, data, or the struggle over applying our understanding of things, that there was something deeply wrong in the bedrock of our country that led us to a point where it didn't matter what data we were switching back to and sending everybody back to work.
I have a couple essays in there that are quite lengthy, and seem to touch on topics that don't speak to each other. There's one on about police brutality, in an essay called A Spray of Split Seconds: that second in which a cop kills a 13-year-old in a Chicago back alley didn't happen in that second—it's a social moment that extends out to the entirety of our social practice in our mode of socially reproducing ourselves, just as the moment in which someone's infected by COVID-19 isn't just what happened in terms of whether someone masks or was vaccinated. There are broader notions of how we socially reproduce ourselves and decisions we make into leading to that moment–that's the context.
And so, the question you're asking about are two essays that are scientifically laden in many terms—there are many ideas I'm struggling with. I'm debating with other people while writing this, and treating all the hypotheses seriously. It really gives the sense that there's much more going on than merely a lab leak, or “it happened to pass from a bat.” You get a much greater sense of the kind of political economy of research of the various factions, not only from China versus the US, but within the US, and the struggle and nature of how we study this very thing. We have a situation where some protagonists are in the business, ostensibly, to protect us from the next pandemic, but instead are actually engaged with agribusiness and other large companies, taking money and greenwashing them, and then allowing them to continue to cut into the forest that, in essence, increases the spillover rate.
As far as the EcoHealth Alliance, they take money from Colgate Palmolive and from Johnson & Johnson. Their leader, Peter Daszak, has gotten millions of dollars from the federal government to investigate outbreaks. Someone had a wonderfully terrible joke: It's not just that EcoHealth Alliance has stopped zero pandemics, they have actually stopped negative one pandemics. Their involvement in some of the experiments that may have led to a lab leak meant Ecohealth Alliance may have been involved in helping the emergence of SARS-2, and also in terms of protecting these various companies. They're helping drive the emergence of the next pathogen out in the field.
So, let me give you the story here. I'm going to start off with the notion of a lab leak as having conspiratorial connotations, rightfully so—some of them are batshit crazy. You want to stay away from that stuff. And some of it, as we began with, is being used as a geopolitical tool, as you describe, to punish China—China's bad for “Zero COVID”; China’s bad for removing “Zero COVID.” Don't get me wrong–in this book and in previous books, I give China's shit when they deserve it. It's not about running interference for China, they've got their problems and are in the business of the BRICS model development; they've moved millions of people out of poverty, but also destroyed much of their landscape in a way that leads to these spillover events. But I'm not in China. While I can critique and criticize, the Chinese people have to make decisions about what to do with that. I am in here in the US and my focus is on making sure that our ruling class doesn't wreck everything.
Before all this happened, there was considerable critique of the expansion of labs around the world. There's a Princeton University team under Matt Keeling's lab over at Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. A postdoc by the name of Thomas Van Boeckel, who helped write a paper out of there, mapped all the new BSL-3 and BSL-4 biosafety labs that were built since 9/11, when the H5N1 [the Avian Flu] became the first celebrity virus. Thousands of labs were built. And while doing so, they mapped the percent of the population in the world that was subsequently now wired into the commuting field out from underneath each of these BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs. These labs are all in the business of trying to figure out ways to protect us from pathogen outbreaks, but in the course of doing so, a rare event, like a lab leak, bends toward inevitability. So, this isn't some wacko idea.
This is coming not only from Matt Keeling's lab at Princeton, but also Laurie Garrett, who is very well known as a writer on diseases, complaining about all the number of lab accidents that have happened in these labs. There's Alison Galvani of Yale University and Marc Lipsitch of Harvard University, very well-known and prominent epidemiologists and modelers, writing extensively on the danger of this. So, this is why I treated the lab leak with respect, and not the wacko versions. This wasn't a bioweapon or anything.
As far as the lab leak hypotheses go, there are two versions of it, what I call the left-wing and right-wing versions of the lab leak. The right-wing one we've been reading all week. It's the Wall Street Journal version: China is hideous. The Wall Street Journal has been banging on this particular possibility since the beginning of COVID. China bad; lab leak; incompetent; hideous. It's part of the new Cold War, but also, it’s really about saying this is a particular accident in a particular time and space. It's not about capitalism, even though you have pathogens emerging everywhere, not just China: Ebola emerged out of increasingly developed Sub Saharan Africa; Zika emerged out of Brazil; the Swine Flu in 2009 emerged out of industrial hog outside Mexico City. We have H5N2 here in 2015, but now H5N1 among in industrial poultry here in the US, and also across Eurasia. We had African Swine Fever that arrived in China in 2018, before COVID emerged. This is a brutal declaration about the nature of our capitalist metabolism and its impact on ecology and epidemiology. But we can't talk about that. If you just blame China, then you can wash your hands of this.
The left-wing version is much more interesting, and it's based on the Bioscience Resource Project. Jonathan Latham, who I've had conversations with about this, and Allison Wilson have a different version of it. First, they discussed the lab leak out of Wuhan Institute of Virology, with the notion that they were conducting gain-of-function studies. “Gain-of-function” means that you have a virus and either engineer it to increase its deadliness to figure it out what this virus might do to us, or you let it evolve on its own to figure out a way to kill the mouse better. In other words, you use natural selection as your industrial tool to do all the hard work to figure out how to be deadlier. Both those things are not good things to do.
Now, we take a step back a couple of years, and we go back to our friends at EcoHealth Alliance, and Peter Datsik. They're not so much about ecology; their notions of ecology are about blaming locals for taking down a stand of trees that might lead to a spillover event. They're involved in what are called absolute geographies—GPS coordinates—where some bad thing ecologically happened. But, they are not interested at all in blaming their grant makers, whether it's the US government, or Colgate Palmolive. They're not interested in talking about relational geographies where capital from one side of the world invests in deforesting and developing the other side of the world that leads to the spillover event. In my view, places like Hong Kong, New York, and London are much more disease hotspots than merely these GPS coordinates because they're putting cash on the barrel to rip down a forest that leads to the spillover event. It's not any indigenous group or smallholder farmers that are doing the worst of the damage.
Ecohealth Alliance decides they're going to do a lot of this gain-of-function work, which is a weird thing to do for an ecology group. But they're backed by millions of dollars from federal agencies, including the Department of Defense. So, they hooked up at the University of North Carolina with the Vineet Menachery, a molecular biologist, and they started doing gain-of-function studies with SARS. Then in 2014, the Obama administration put a moratorium on things: "You can't do these kinds of studies." They're absolutely insane to do because of the danger of a lab leak. Can you imagine a weaponized SARS escaping Chapel Hill into the local community? You don't want to do those things. This is precisely what Matt Keeling's group warned about with their maps of all the BSL-3 and 4 labs being built.
So, despite the moratorium, it's my understanding that NIH [National Institutes of Health] gave them approval because it's not just the University of North Carolina there. They also have Zhengli Shi, who is known as “the bat lady,” who does a lot of work on SARS stuff for the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And this is all in the open literature there—you can look up the papers, and you can see who's listed in them. But I think what happens when Obama puts in the moratorium—which Trump basically strips back in 2017—I think NIH approves Ecohealth Alliance to take their money to do those kinds of experiments in Wuhan who had an institute for virology. In other words, there's a convergence of opportunity and intent.
This is why the lab leak idea deserves a serious examination. I'm not a proponent of the lab leak hypothesis, I believe in the field hypotheses, but what I'm getting it is the kind of seriousness by which this kind of thing should be unpacked. Jonathan Latham at the Bioscience Research Project first thought that it was a gain-of-function virus that left the back door at Wuhan and ended up at the food market in Wuhan. But subsequently, they changed their mind about it, and decided on a second version of this, the Mojiang mine version of the lab leak.
What happened was six miners in Mojiang and Yunnan–which is a southwestern province in China, far from Wuhan–go into a cave there to mine bat guano, to use it as fuel or something else. All six get sick, and three of them die. Latham has a master's thesis translated from Chinese describing their infection. And although other groups subsequently deny this, from my reading of the English translation, it certainly sounds like a COVID. But at the time, it wasn't decided or diagnosed as that. Zhengli Shi, from Wuhan Institute of Virology, and their team goes down and does all sorts of sampling there. There are the six samples from the patients who got sick with some SARS-like thing, and the samples that the group took from that cave and around Yunnan, and brought it back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which subsequently opened into a BSL-4 lab in 2015 [with visits from US science diplomats in 2018]. So, his hypothesis is that it then leaks out of the backdoor from that way, and isn't from the Ecohealth Alliance stuff–it's from the cave instead.
In my book, I go into explaining all the problems with this hypothesis, or the things that I disagree with, and the science that is opposed to it. Again, I agree more with the hypothesis of field emergence, but those who are opposed to the lab leak hypothesis in the US are not good people, either. They don't have their shit together at all. There's Kristian Andersen, an evolutionary genomics guy out of California, who wrote a paper in early 2020, basically saying, "It's definitely not a lab leak.” Why? “Because SARS-2 is different from SARS-1. If anyone wanted to engineer this thing, they would make it look exactly like SARS-1," which makes no sense at all. It's like total baby talk, no one would agree with that. Anyone who knew of gain-of-function would understand a way you can get a virulent SARS just by serial passage, and you don't need to engineer it in your lab–the virus will figure it out. And you can end up with a new way of producing dangerous SARS by not having to make it look like exactly like SARS-1. There are plenty of versions of SARS: MERS is out there, a Middle East version of it, and evolved its own version of being a deadly coronavirus. It didn't have to act exactly like SARS. But Anderson is, as I described in the book, really in cahoots with Fauci to work through ways in which to eliminate the notion that lab leak is possible. So, I'm in total favor of the field hypothesis, but I do not in any way line up with those who favor the field hypothesis here in the US, mostly because they were at the time trying to wash their hands of the notion that a lab leak was at all possible, which is complete BS.
I appreciate your patience on this because the story here is not told at all, almost in any way. When you read the Wall Street Journal, you would have no idea of all the background that leads to the conflict, subtleties, clashes, or the landscape in which all these hypotheses are presently jockeying.
Another one of the versions of the field hypothesis puts the origins of the virus in the Wuhan market, not too far from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but also taking in all sorts of animals that have been historically shown to carry COVID. There was another team there in November 2019 and took photos of the market along with three other markets, and they found things like raccoon dog, hog badger, Chinese hair, and red fox being sold there. This is against Latham and Wilson, who declared that the market couldn't possibly be the source because Wuhan didn't have southern cuisine—this is precisely what was being sold at the Wuhan market: animals historically from the south and part of Southern cuisine. And I think Huanan actually reads as “Southern foods.”
So, there's Michael Worobey's group, and Worobey has had a lot of fame for helping figure out the origins of HIV in southeastern Cameroon. It's really remarkable stuff. But I don't necessarily agree with everything Worobey says about the Wuhan market, but they do a couple of studies that are very interesting. One is an evolutionary study and the other is a geospatial statistical analysis of the Wuhan market. The evolutionary study shows there were two different strains of SARS circulating in the Wuhan market, and these are from environmental samples that are found largely in the side of the market that does live animal selling. Those two strains emerged out of an animal and a human, and what's remarkable about them is it really gives the implication that at that point, SARS-2 had evolved to a point that it was radioactive—different strains emerging at the same point, in this case, in the market. The geospatial analysis shows that largely, again, it was in that section in which they were selling the animals. And then in the early days, in January and February 2020, you had spillover into the local community, and it wasn't just elderly people getting it. They were able to identify that, and then after that, that kind of geographical signal is lost, and both strains–A and B–subsequently spread out through the rest of China. In this case, I talked about opportunity and intent from the virus vantage point. There is data showing the virus evolved there and data showing spatially that, in all likelihood, it originated out of the market itself. There's no signal that it came from anywhere near the Wuhan neighborhood.
At the same time, there's George Gao's group–the Chinese group. George Gao has done remarkable work, but I think he's under considerable pressure. He basically says it started in the market, but humans brought it in. It just happens to be the market was a nexus of people gathering together. I'm not on that side of things. Reading Michael Worobey's work, I'm increasingly convinced that it did spread and emerge there. Partly, he's trying to nail it all down by saying it came from an animal, and George Gao was trying to say it arrived at the market and came by human, but doesn't want to say it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So, he's in a bind. He wants to say it's brought in by humans, but doesn't want to say it came over from the lab. He does want to say things—and you hear Zhengli Shi also say this, almost like it's clearly coming from the government—along the lines that SARS-2 originated from outside China, and it came in through frozen foods or stuff like that. It's my view that's complete bullshit. They're just trying to wash their hands of it.
This is where I brought in both the lab leak stuff and the Wuhan market is basically organized in a kind of forensic model of things, like Law and Order. We want to nail down what actual animal infected what human, and missing the entire point. Instead, If we follow Worobey’s notion that, in essence, there are already multiple strains circulating in the market, and saying the virus arrived from out of town already on its way to going human to human, [it illustrates a different picture].
And in fact, the many scientists involved in evolutionary genomics are the unspoken heroes in my view: Shu-Miaw Chaw, Maciej Boni, Konstantinos Voskarides, and Spyros Lytras— names that nobody has heard of, who actually went into the evolutionary genetics, took the genetic sequences of all the samples that they were able to find in bats and humans, and were able to reconstruct how the virus has been spreading over the course of time. There are very long lengths of time between what were considered the closest related bat specimens and actual SARS-2. They were evolving from each other decades ago, and are seeing spillover events and recombination between different strains happening over the course of thousands of miles across South and Central China. They're hypothesizing some versions of SARS-2 were circulating in humans years before, and have a much grander view of how this happened. It didn't just show up in this animal at Wuhan, although that spillover event may have happened.
If you want to discuss causality, you have to speak about: What are the supply lines that led to wild foods being turned into the largest market in Wuhan, alongside more traditional livestock? How did wild foods become as capitalized, or much more of an official source of food, as livestock were? You get into the history of Chinese food and into the lengths of commodity chains, how on the other end of production, where industrial livestock competes with the wild food industry to cut into the forest to find either animals directly or land in which to grow these animals, and you get into a much wider field of causality that moves us away from the Law and Order forensics to broader notions of how diseases emerge. And some scientists have gotten to this point.
Roger Frutos is someone who's been basically writing on some of this, although he doesn't mention circuits of capital the way our team does, or about the socio-metabolic imprint upon landscapes of capitalist development, but at least he's getting the picture that it's not about what specific animal at what specific time. The lab leak and that kind of Wuhan market hypothesis are in some ways much more related to each other than this notion of looking at the broader landscape of development as it relates to circuits of capital because they are both about washing the hands of an economic system that causes the damage. We build these labs to clean up the mess of the pathogens that emerge from our production!
Then, at the same time, if you focus on smallholders and indigenous people, like Ecohealth Alliance does, you can blame them for it, even though it's the people giving them money that is driving the deforestation and development on a global level. If you just look at the Wuhan market, it's only focused on the question that maybe is not as important as: How do we arrive at a place where wild food is industrialized? How did we arrive at a place in which the chains of commerce are linking the deepest forests, where bats, birds, and other animals have long been reservoirs for these pathogens, developing and connecting them to local provincial capitals, and these marginalized pathogens getting on the global travel and trade network from Wuhan to Miami Beach in a matter of days? That's the question. That's the issue.
By not focusing on these questions, it allows everybody to wash their hands of having to talk about how our present model of economic development and social reproduction is the source of the pathogen, and that the causalities are not just in the object of the virus or the host, but in the field of relationships felt by humans and nonhumans from one part of the world to the other.
FARNSWORTH Thank you for going over that. There are so many complex details, but nonetheless, explaining it in that way really helps clarify many different aspects of this.
I wanted to reference someone that I interviewed some months ago, Boyce Upholt, a great journalist and freelance writer who wrote a piece for the New Republic about Avian Flu [H5N1], describing biosecurity and the nature of these poultry farms across the US. There are so many different layers to peel back here, and I want to make a few different references.
Online, I remember you wrote you've been badgered by plenty of people: "Can you please talk about all this attention that's now being given to Avian Flu?" It's been written about quite a bit, the overwhelming concern that we could have a horrible, infectious, and deadly Avian Flu spill over into human beings and have something on par with the 1918 influenza pandemic, which likely originated from a chicken farm in Kansas.
To get to the point here, I feel the SARS-2 virus is just at this threshold where once the billionaires and the political elite recognized they could insulate themselves from the effects on an individual level, while also making enormous profits off the conditions set by it, they then stopped giving a shit about it. The precautionary principle is out the window—who gives a shit the workers are getting it, they're just healthy enough that they can go back to work. Yes, we're in more crisis laden times, but nonetheless, we're fine. Class interests are being met.
With something like a bird flu, it's on a level where the casualties will be higher if spillover were to occur. There's an interesting dynamic playing out, and I just want to get your thoughts on this because it's not even just about Avian Flu. It's about how we have set up the conditions for when something worse comes along, potentially happening concurrently with what's happening right now, there's not going to really be an appetite or interest in really dealing with it because then we’d have to admit that the measures we took at the beginning of the SARS-2 pandemic were actually good and should be used not just for this pandemic, but for other epidemics or pandemics as well. It's this interesting place that I feel like we've come to where we're accepting, almost, the inevitability of something worse coming along, but not willing to actually engage in proactive measures to even prevent it from occurring because it would admit that we fucked up on this particular issue.
Do you have any thoughts about this contradictory sort of attitude that we're seemingly living in right now? I say "we," but particularly those that are supposed to be managing the economy and the State.
WALLACE It's a great question. If you see me laughing, it's out of utter despair, one must laugh to keep from crying because I think you explained it very well, as far as the state of things: the contradictory, the clusterfuck.
It’s at a point presently where I, along with the People's CDC and others that think COVID is a problem, are pointed at as the problem because we overreacted to COVID, and therefore reduced children’s development by not having them go to school, and so on—never mind the 1.1 million dead and all the people sick with Long COVID. It's been so twisted around that those of us who are arguing along the lines that these protections actually can help people and might help us prepare to help people once again [are seen as the problem]. The damage here is such that, as I described earlier, not only has public health as a practice been absolutely gutted in terms of our practicing it and funding it, but also as a very concept.
This whole thing that we might go about preparing for what is, in all likelihood, additional outbreaks—I'm not saying that people should be locked down in preparation of that at all, it just happens to be that we have a BSL-3 virus circulating, and we might learn a few things along the way to protect ourselves. You're supposed to come out of the pandemic with a greater appreciation of public health to allow you to be prepared for what comes next. And instead, we have the opposite. We have all those who basically champion the notion that public health isn't a real thing, including public health practitioners, who are very much integrated with connection to power. We are, in essence, worse off than we were, instead of better off. You're supposed to learn shit, and we not at the moment.
In The Fault in Our SARS, I wrote a piece called Puzzled Patients, about what's a black fungus that emerged and infected patients in India with COVID-19. Other pathogens are co-circulating, and oftentimes will act in cahoots at the molecular level. It's called reciprocal activation: one virus's proteins will set off the proteins of the other virus, and they both do much better than the under the conditions. But it also is found at the epidemiological and ecological level—HIV and Kaposi's sarcoma, a herpes virus, is a good example. HIV and all those opportunistic infections did very well by each other, and spread a lot more. Of course, COVID, just being out and about, and not taking care of business, leads to additional deaths by virtue of people not being able to go to the hospital.
But in addition, there were hypotheses that African Swine Fever that emerged and eventually ended up in China in 2017-2018 may have been, in part, a socio-ecological cause of the emergence of COVID. Because with African Swine Fever, the domestic market for hogs collapsed, which may have led to more incursion into local forests to get wild animals to cover for the loss in protein. I doubt that's true, but the point is important: different pathogens are interacting with each other at multiple levels. The complexity of the combinations of interactions is getting beyond even the experts' capacity to grasp the nature of it all.
Your point of it emerging in parallel is it's a critical one. I would say that my Facebook post was pushing back on the kind of trainspotting among the disease folk of going for the next new thing. COVID is still circulating and has killed 15 million: Can you pay attention to what's going on now? It’s the notion of getting a serotonin hit over the next virus that might kill a billion people. I'm not saying that I haven't done that before myself, but I came to the realization that it is also a way of distracting us from the ongoing outbreak that's happening now.
H5N1/H5NX has been circulating as a dangerous thing for a long time. Not just the original H5N1, the original gangster from 1997. We're talking about this particular H5 index emerging in 2014-2015, circulating through Eurasia and coming to America—we had an outbreak in 2015, and again in 2021-2022, killing millions of birds here. The worry, of course, is that you have some seals getting infected. It’s implied some mammal to mammal transmission—minks have been infected that way. There are multiple examples of that in the last few years. I'm not saying that it isn't creeping in that direction. I'm just saying the sudden interest in it over the fact that there's some of us have been talking about this for more than two decades that this was likely to happen is two things.
The first is, to be fair, we were writing about this for some time, and then you choose to be upset about it now, even though it was as dangerous at that time as it is to us now. The second is I have to catch myself. If we remember my first essay on COVID in February 2020, I wrote about how exhausted I am already, in part because there's so much of this leading to this moment and nothing was done to intervene, even at that point. There might be another version of that going on right now. I got three years squeezed out of me on COVID for now, and the notion of having to worry about H5N1 at this point is exhausting to thinking about.
But also, it’s getting sucked into the excitement of the new emergence and never really thinking through what COVID has been teaching us–a masterclass that has given us a much better intuitive understanding of the nature of pathogens and what they can do, not only to our individual bodies, but to our societies. We've utterly failed in terms of our response, but we do have a more visceral understanding of those things. To not have learned the lessons enough to prepare for the next one is utterly ludicrous. And yet, this is where we're at, where those of us, as you brought up earlier, are being gaslighted and shamed for an overreaction, if you call 15 million people dead or more an overreaction.
And you're right, if you go from 2% mortality rate to 25-30%, it's a whole new game. Why would the rich be okay with this? We talked about this the first time I appeared on your show, discussing the cycles of accumulation: Coming out of World War II, we continued up on our cycle of accumulation, as the Marxists and world systems theorists talk about it, where you start off turning money into capital and building imperial infrastructure from that. And when things start to fall apart, the rich bail and turn capital into money: "We're not in the business of building things."
Didn't the Ohio train derailment tell us anything about the fact we're not building rail anymore, or building in protections? Rail is just another means by which to strip assets. Wall Street owns much of that rail company [Norfolk Southern] and many of the others. And so, it comes to fracking: you poison your own waterways to get a few puffs of natural gas. They're in the business of stripping out what was built into that infrastructure. Whether it's a physical or social representation of the public commons that came out of building Empire, which sucks for all involved, but contained this notion of public health, a railway system, and somewhat clean waterways. Now we are on the other side of that: the rich fatten themselves up, bailing out and turning capital into money.
Whether it's conscious or not, there is a grim certainty about the way they're acting that seems so structural and representative of all the other cashing out that happened historically, whether it’s the Italian city states, Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and then the US–those empires rose and fell with many of the same dynamics. There was talk about whether China would replace us on that, but we may not have the ecology to support another round of capitalism.
Vijay Prashad appeared at my book launch, and his point is that he's stunned by the utter mediocrity of our ruling class here. At the same time, their impulse of bailing and cashing out is structural, but also, it feels like our political class is dumber these days. Not to put anybody Lyndon Johnson or anybody else on a pedestal, but there's an aspect that they knew how to run Empire. We've gotten to the point where the hideous Henry Kissinger asks, "What the fuck are we doing starting a war with China and Russia?" He can't get his mind wrapped around that, and that guy has a lot to answer for.
It's a terrible historical moment. I don't like to end in notions of hope because it is often used as a placeholder to deal with the damage that we're feeling from what's going on. However, I do believe in what's called active optimism. I think there are plenty of amazing things that are happening. People are coming to realizations—I think the anger at the Ohio derailment really speaks volumes. For the agroecologists around the world, from both the Global North and Global South, we’re seeing the decision to consciously move in the direction of turning agriculture back toward a natural economy and better integrating with the local landscapes, more in the cooperative direction of people getting together and working together with each other. You see it here, even in the Midwest. Conservative farmers are coming to conclusions that a more of regenerative agriculture is necessary, with some of them doing the more minimal version of just healthy soils. God bless them. If they want to do healthy soils and less runoff, that's fantastic. In fact, there were some of the counties that our group was studying, like one in Wisconsin, in what we considered a more conventional and conservative county, before we even got there—we had nothing to do with this—the dairy farmers were working with the healthy rivers folk to try to have less runoff. We had nothing to do with that. This is a destitute, Senator Scott Walker supporter county, but they were figuring out stuff to move in a direction to do this. And that's a beautiful thing, it really speaks to the possibility that we can avoid Civil War–all this shit in the newspapers about Democrat versus Republican or city versus rural.
There are means and mechanisms by which we can find our way. I will never work with fascists, that's not going to happen—we all have our lines in the sand with this stuff—but to be able to work with people who understand enough that industrializing agricultural production was a hideous, horrible thing. And if we can somehow move in a direction that not only is involved with healthy soils, but also with farmer autonomy and community control of supply lines, then we're cooking. If the US, which was basically served as a horrible model of industrial production for the rest of the world, can somehow make a turn in the direction of a healthier agroecology, that, by virtue of its agrobiodiversity by having all sorts of different animals across the landscape or on farm, will help control and stop the emergence of these deadly pathogens. If you have a diverse landscape of livestock and poultry, something like Avian Influenza is unlikely to be able to pick up the speed necessary to be as deadly as it is now.
FARNSWORTH I think everything in this discussion is dire and difficult to process. It's one thing to intellectualize it and look at it on a scientific level, certainly, but the emotional weight of it is real. But there is work happening that is, as you described, not about political ideology as much as it is just looking at the landscape and realizing this isn't right, let's do something and move in a different direction. People are figuring out the means to do that.
I really appreciate you ending on that note and for taking time to go over all this information.
WALLACE Thank you very much. I appreciate the invitation here to be able to talk about these things. This is the first time I've actually gone through all the different possibilities in terms of the origins of COVID-19, and I appreciate your patience going through that.
Like the book overall, I think you'll draw meaning and frankly, I think you’ll be a different person on the other side of reading the book, so thanks for inviting me.
