#auspol #covid19 a pandemic is a socio-political event rather than a biological event. For a given pathogen,…
#auspol #covid19 a pandemic is a socio-political event rather than a biological event. For a given pathogen, the spread of infection is entirely determined by the social and political arrangements it encounters. /1
For this reason, all of the ways the pandemic has been described in biological terms can be more accurately re-cast in social and political terms. A thread exploring just some dimensions of this re-framing. /2
Most generally, the idea that SARS-Cov-2 is something that invaded our 'normal' life is wrong. Its existence and then development and spread is intrinsic to what we call normal life. The landscape clearing for example which drove the zoonosis was our social/political creation. /3
Once in our societies, varying amounts of mobility at all scales (local, regional, national, international) created the spread of infection, overlaid upon degrees of socio-economic disadvantage, which usually forced the poor to continue to work and become infected. /4
A virus can't move on its own. People are its transport mechanism. All spread is therefore driven by these patterns of social and political organisation. If SARS-Cov-2 had emerged in a village separated from the rest of the world, it would have begun and ended there. /5
To emphasise the political, the pandemic to date hasn't been a story of societies battling this particular virus. It's been the competition between various models of social and political life. Most generally an extreme libertarianism.../6
...opposing just about all restriction on these existing patterns of social and political life. Up against a more traditional public health approach, recognising the need for collective effort to overcome the collective challenge. /7
It's that libertarianism, most prominently seen in the US, UK and Brazil, which quickly led to mass infection and casualties. That set of political ideas frames societies as 'economies', and throughout there has been constant calls from these true believers.../8
...to 'balance' public health action against economic damage. A clearly nonsensical, oxymoronic framing, when what they're calling the Economy is the socio-political arrangements actually creating the pandemic spread. Similarly, the idea of 'variants'. /9
There are variants of SAR-Cov-2 at the biological level. However just as with the original appearance of the virus in Wuhan, these in turn were generated by specific socio-political conditions. Continuous spread, giving the virus access to fresh hosts to allow it to mutate. /10
We can re-cast these variants therefore in socio-political terms. There have been several, perhaps beginning with education. At the start of the pandemic libertarians openly said children should continue in school, so parents could work. Naked economic self-interest. /11
As resistance to this grew, this morphed into the variant that 'children's mental health and education will suffer if they miss school'. Said by people who previously had so little interest in education/children that they presided over decades of plummeting school outcomes. /12
This mental health/education variant is virulent, and continues to this day. Perhaps next chronologically was the evolution of the 'live with the virus' variant. (Note I'm not trading in analogies here - these are literally the socio-political causes of these variants.) /13
The 'live with the virus' variant has various sub-strains, such as minimisation of the apparent risk of SARS-Cov-2 - Trump's 'Kung Flu', and many describing it as 'just a flu'. A set of beliefs to encourage people to see the pandemic as typical, a standard flu season. /14
Another sub-strain links back to the mental health idea, that action against the viral spread will irreparably damage all people's mental health. More recently the libertarians have adopted endemicity ideas, cloaking their 'just a flu' with the idea that the virus is.../15
...already endemic, and we should just get back to normal life. Vaccines have now been cast as treatments against this (apparent) incursion of a virus into 'normal' life, and the sooner we all get the treatment, the faster normal life will be back. /16
Which of course bring us back to the idea of the virus invading society, rather than society (the Economy) generating it. All of these socio-political variants are our true enemy in this pandemic, they create and prolong it. They will continue to mutate as needed. /17
As we've seen with the same groups opposing climate change, continuously shifting their strategic framings to generate socio-political resistance to action. We need to ruthlessly deconstruct all of these framings, every time they appear. /18
Ultimately the pandemic is just one other symptom of our social and political arrangements, not some event that appeared out of nowhere, like an asteroid from space. It's the outcome of many decades of repeated reconstruction of societies along extreme libertarian lines. /end