Original post at La Repubblica.
At the heart of the word ‘immunity’, is munus: duty. Before immunity circulated in our blood, it was made in the partitions of the Roman Empire. Some ‘free cities’ within the Empire were ‘libera et immunis’, free and without the duties – usually taxes – to Rome. If the Empire required it, that immunity might be rescinded and the cities compelled once again to send money and soldiers. Normally, though, these cities were free to enjoy their status: inferior to Rome, but enclosed and encouraged to conduct business in ways that would remain profitable.
Now that the Global North is on its way to being fully vaccinated, now that we return to work so that the economy can conduct its business, it may feel that we have been released from our duties to the virus. No more lockdowns or masks. With a wave of a QR code, we can pretend that we have been transported back to 2019, free and immune, in a world free of walls.
It feels absurd to ask what we owe Covid. Surely, Covid owes us. My loved ones died gasping for breath, drowning in their own pneumonia. Covid drove the world to penury. Covid propagated planetary hunger. Covid killed 18 million people. Covid’s debts are estimated at over 12 trillion dollars.
Yet Covid is the offspring of human misadventure. We are its parents. The precise paternity is still disputed. Covid’s origins look less like a lab leak, and more the result of evolution in the wild. Virological detectives are testing theories about whether the disease emerged from the capitalizt cesspits of wet markets, or from forests which had been so compressed by human logging that species that usually were strangers became pressed together.
Covid is a zoonotic disease, jumping from one animal to another. Such diseases are more likely to emerge when animals are confined together, and then fall ill, and then are dosed with enough antibiotics to keep them profitable. You don’t need to explain pandemic disease through an elaborate science fiction of wicked scientists and misanthropic billionaires hoping to wipe the human slate clean. Modern farming will do just as well. Zoonosis loves industrial monoculture, the strange fiction in which the life of only one species matters, and humans attempt – ultimately unsuccessfully – to eradicate all other living beings. Like SARS, MERS, Zika, H1N1, H7N5 and others, Covid is a product, a symptom of capitalist appropriation, an externality of the production process of industrial meat, timber, tropical products.
The virus remains among us. It has jumped species again, now living in deer in North America. The animals are untroubled by the disease, but are a reservoir in which the virus will live and mutate. Not even the most feral of American hunters imagines they can render extinct all 25 million of these creatures. Humans will have to live with this virus and its hosts. We are, however, not prepared to do what it asks of us. So we pretend it has been conquered.
For those lucky enough to access the most effective public health systems, it’s possible to inject yourself with the bottled good fortune of an mRNA vaccine, and to imagine that everyone else can too. With this publicly funded immunity, we can continue the fiction that masks are optional, because our duties to one another, to the immunocompromised and the unvaccinated young have been dissolved in Pfizer’s vials. Our duty now is to the economy, to return GDP to its prior heights, to grow.
Such magical thinking was always a part of our pandemic. Just as the first wave of lockdowns began in Texas, our lieutenant governor suggested that he, and others over 70, should be ready to die so that the economy might live. He said this when there were five Covid-related deaths in Texas, in March 2020. The number of Covid dead in Texas, a state of 29 million people, is now 87,843.
Of course, our lieutenant governor is still alive. His call for sacrifice was never about his sacrifice. The past two years have been a measure of who is expendable. Since we cannot defeat the virus, the rich expend the poor. In the United States, Black and low-income areas were more likely to die from the disease. In Texas, the early hotspots were prisons and slaughter-houses, the places of confinement and death partitioned away from decent and civilized society, and disproportionately filled with migrants, women, the poor.
The walls around what passes for civilization are porous. Covid is a reminder that capitalist society, and its partitions, are easily breached. Through luck and violence, many in the Global North have been able to pretend that we can live duty-free within the web of life. The duty-free lounge, a place of hyper-capitalist wonder filled by the olfactory temptations of perfume, fine wine, tobacco and Toblerone., is an appropriate metaphor, especially as we cultivate an amnesia about a virus whose signature symptom is the loss of smell.
To leave this transit lounge, to acknowledge the human paternity of this virus, and to give it its due, should change everything. We’d recognize the value of all life, not just those of the rich. We would recognize that to value human life demands not perpetual isolation – Zero Covid’s lockdowns cannot work forever – but a revolution of care. For one another, for the web of life.
Our duties of care demand a public health system that prevents us from making new disease, that abolishes the lethal practices of corporate logging, agriculture, and extraction. There are effective and proven practices with which to replace these imperial technologies: agroecological farming weaves humans back into the web of life. None should pretend that the treatment is easy. Covid offers a difficult diagnosis of late capitalism. This virus also points to a cure: a world without walls, filled with duties of care, and enriched by the deep medicine of equality.