All tagged COVID-19
Long Covid Action Project (LCAP) activists Corsi Rosenthal (CR) and Clean Air (CA), along with journalist and LCAP founder Joshua Pribanic, discuss the recent direct action CR and CA participated in to disrupt the National Institute of Health's (NIH) first meeting for the RECOVER Initiative, ostensibly created to "understand, treat, and prevent Long COVID" in the United States.
Epidemiologist and writer Abby Cartus joins me in this two-part interview to explore a fascinating set of questions: What does it mean for public health to fail? What does it mean for it to succeed? Also, I asked Abby to clarify the kinds of data that are collected—mainly from wastewater sites—and how that data is modeled and presented at this phase of the pandemic.
Abby Cartus writes about these subjects for her newsletter, Closed Form, and this interview is based on several of the essays she's produced for it. Due to time constraints, we ended up recording our entire discussion over the course of two days, and was released in two parts.
Social critic and writer Nate Bear joins me to discuss his work over the years communicating his insights into the intersections between the ongoing pandemic, human-caused climate disruption, and biospheric collapse. Nate describes how the abandonment of the population to repeated infection, mass illness, and death, is layered into the compounding crises affecting the living systems of the planet today.
Reading Nate Bear’s writings have been a balm for me. His essays are fascinating and educational, citing diverse sets of scientific research and historical accounts that bring our Covid age into a starker clarity. While many of the subjects he chooses to cover are often dire in nature, I find it reassuring to read his honest assessments of the global pandemic and how it intersects with the broader existential and ecological predicaments we face on this planet we all share. As listeners of this podcast have shared with me, having meaningful discussions about—or in the case of Nate’s essays, reading about—our global predicament, and the political, economic, cultural, and historical reasons why it’s occurring, can provide psychological and emotional relief from the inane, obfuscating, trivial bullshit that demands our regular attention.
Long Covid Action Project [LCAP] activists Stephanie and Linda, along with journalist and LCAP founder Joshua Pribanic, join me in this impromptu interview to discuss the recent direct action Linda and Stephanie participated in at the Senate HELP Committee Hearing on January 18, ostensibly held to address the ongoing and growing Long Covid crisis in the United States.
This is the first in an ongoing series of interviews done in collaboration with journalist and LCAP founder and activist Joshua Pribanic to address the realities of what Long Covid is, and the action needed to address this issue comprehensively.
Jonathan Howard MD joins me to discuss his timely book, We Want Them Infected: How the Failed Quest for Herd Immunity Led Doctors to Embrace the Anti-Vaccine Movement and Blinded Americans to the Threat of COVID, published by Redhawk Publications.
As much as Jonathan Howard’s book is a scathing examination of how various very influential and contrarian doctors misled the US public about the coronavirus pandemic, it is also a historical document. By meticulously, carefully, and thoroughly quoting countless social media posts, statements, essays, op-eds, and interviews from certain highly accredited doctors, Dr. Howard compares their claims to actual reality as the virus began to rip through the population. Over and over again, these outspoken figures made bold and inaccurate claims that the pandemic was just about to end; herd immunity was just around the corner; the worst of the plague had already past; children were unaffected; and so on. Over and over again, these contrarian figures were proven wrong. And yet, despite overwhelming evidence, they still maintain their professional status and accreditation to this day, seemingly unhindered—professionally, at least—by the widespread consequences of their repeated false assumptions and claims.
Legal historian and author Nate Holdren joins me to discuss broken sociality, political and social loneliness, and social murder and its depoliticization during the pandemic, as elucidated in his Peste Magazine essay Broken Sociality: Isolation in the Pseudo-Return to “Pre-Pandemic Normal”.
The pandemic emergency has been declared over, both here in the United States, and by the World Health Organization. That does not mean the pandemic is over, but it marks an official end to an emergency level institutional response to it. Any sort of practical and enforceable mitigatory practices to reduce the spread of the virus has been firmly relegated to the past. To add insult to injury, the trauma or discomforts incurred over the past three years are often blamed on these public health measures themselves by high-status conservative and liberal commentators and so-called experts alike. Nevermind the millions dead, the global vaccine apartheid, the tens of millions disabled and those that continue to become disabled, and what those facts mean. The virus’s plethora of variants will continue to infect and reinfect the global population into the foreseeable future—a slow burn with grim long-term consequences.
When I read Nate Holdren’s essay on broken sociality and political and social loneliness as the “urgency of normal” takes precedence in the US, it struck a chord within me. He provided a language to describe my feelings and experiences at this stage of the ongoing pandemic.
For those of us still masking and avoiding the plague, still keeping up on covid research to the best of our ability, and still admonishing our peers to be mindful of how our behaviors and decisions impact all of us, especially for the most vulnerable, oftentimes a gulf can and does emerge and deepen between our relationships with others that disregard these considerations. When an intrinsically collective health crisis is minimized, and in many cases, outrightly denied by our peers, day-to-day life becomes a lonely affair.
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.
Death Panel co-host and disability justice advocate Beatrice Adler-Bolton returns to the podcast to discuss their new book Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, co-authored with Artie Vierkant and published through Verso Books. Health Communism “offers an overview of life and death under capitalism and argues for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and one of its primary tools: health.”
Throughout this 90 minute interview, Beatrice and I build on our last discussion in March (during which we discussed the “sociological production of the end of the pandemic”), incorporating concepts outlined in Health Communism. Key among those are defining the “surplus” class or population(s), in which, under the economic valuation of life under capitalism, whole populations are relegated to a regime of “extractive abandonment” — “the process by which these populations are made profitable to capital”, and a “means by which the state constructs “health” culturally, politically, and institutionally.”
Beatrice Adler-Bolton, disability justice advocate and co-host of the Death Panel podcast, joins me to discuss the sociological production of the "end of the pandemic," and what that means for the "surplus" populations made most vulnerable by the economic demands of capital. She is the author of the upcoming book Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, co-authored with Artie Vierkant, which "argues for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and health."
As the hosts of the Death Panel podcast have documented, discussed, and warned, the declarations made by the political and economic elites that we have entered into a "post-Covid" reality — where any and all public health measures meant to mitigate the spread of the virus are effectively lifted, and deemed unnecessary moving forward — is but a sociological construct, not based in epidemiological reality and sound public health policy. We have entered into the "let it rip" phase of the pandemic, it seems. What does this mean for the immunocompromised/disabled and other vulnerable populations, as practically all efforts and measures (however weak) to mitigate the spread of this virus come to an end?
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.
The fertile grounds that bred a novel, deadly coronavirus and the misinformation that accompanied its spread is our subject. Over the last year-and-a-half since COVID spilled over, and more specifically, when our collective reaction to it began to reshape every aspect of our lives, I conducted numerous interviews to make sense of this thing.
Brian Mier, co-editor at Brasil Wire and correspondent at teleSUR English, returns to the podcast to detail some of the most prominent and pressing issues facing Brazil today, much of which was documented in the recently released Redfish documentary Dismantling Brazil: Bolsonaro's Neoliberal Agenda, which he co-produced.
