Rob wallace - Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19

DEAD EPIDEMIOLOGISTS

On the Origins of COVID-19

DEAD EPIDEMIOLOGISTS

Rob Wallace

Copyright 2020 by Rob Wallace

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available from the publisher

ISBN paper: 978-158367-902-9

ISBN cloth: 978-158367-903-6

ISBN eBook: 978-158367-904-3

ON THE COVER: Jennifer McQuiston, Jonathan Towner and Brian Amman approach a bat cave in Queen Elizabeth National Park (Uganda) on August 25, 2018. Amman and Towner, CDC scientists, gathered twenty bats that reside in Maramagambo Forest as part of a research project to determine flight patterns and how they transmit Marburg virus to humans.

Typeset in Minion Pro and Brown

MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS, NEW YORK

monthlyreview.org

5 4 3 2 1

Contents

IN THE MEMORY OF
ENOCK BENJAMIN, RAFAEL BENJAMIN, AND CELSO MENDOZA

Chen could see bits and pieces of the future, but only in equations. A frequent lament. Numbers could attack the flesh, the will, but rarely built it up. Morale for them never lay in the numbers. He made poetry out of his premonitions, his equations, because theyd proven useless to him as fact, because he was never sure whether he was actually seeing the past.

JEFF VANDERMEER (2019)

Preface

When I tell you Im Mexican, Im pointing to the country that wanted me dead first. When I tell you I feel American, Im telling you I often think about how Ill die here. Sometimes, when we cite our geographies, were telling you what we survived and what is going to kill us.

MISS JESS (2020)

LATE MARCH THIS YEAR, Im lying on my bed gasping for breath, trying to catch up on the days deoxygenation, a plane slowly falling out of the sky. A half hour into the evenings pantingand nothing so pleasurable as the noise impliesits a bit of a wonder that I am now what I study. Ive got COVID-19 and in my lungs something whose ancestor circulated among bats in greater Yunnan, on the other side of the planet, maybe only the year before. Millions sheltering in place, our worlds are both smaller than at any other time in most of our lives and, with this specter from half a world away haunting infected and well alike, too large from which to hunker down. Were more online than ever, seeing almost nothing of our neighbors, the busiest streets ghost towns to the end of the empty light rail line. Through May, before the revolt and demonstrations here in the States, our social geometries were folded inside out, with all the trauma of a snake whose live meal ate its way out into the clear.

Where did I pick up my infection?

Earlier in March, I traveled to a premonitory of a conference on racial injustice and health held in Jackson, Mississippi. I flew in to New Orleans a few days earliercheaper ticketstaking in a quiet night on the town I hadnt visited in twenty-seven years. A career along the poverty line, this middle-aged man stayed at a youth hostel before taking a Greyhound north through a part of the country he hadnt seen before. In the room with two bunk beds lay a European intermittently coughing out his guts. Maybe him? Yeah, a distinct possibility. Or was it in the movie theater a few days earlier in St. Paul when a stye suddenly struck me mid-reel? Or upon my return, at the community event in Minneapolis that a couple soon sick attended, later conscientiously announcing their infections, confirmed by what testing was thenand, ugh, is even nowonly kinda available.

COVID-19 in the United States proved canonical. Pandemics slow and fastHIV and H1N1 (2009)typically get sucked into New York City early on before being blown back out to the rest of the country by way of the travel network, down a hierarchy of town size, economic power, and travel load.

Our airports and the high-end shopping there have been remodeled as cathedrals to the neoliberal sublime. American bus stations are more packing centers for delivering the poor and working class, making their wayI overheard several conversations in Nawlins and Baton Rougeto sheltering in place with friends and family against bad partners and bad wages long before the outbreak. One man, just released from jail, with all he possessed in a brown paper bag. Another leaving a marriage for a job. At the other end of something of a spectrum, an oil rigger, chatting up a woman of a certain age, with cash enough to invest in house-flipping. People rough in manner but for the most part fine in spirit, however much any of us manifest our circumstances.

The bus drivers and the station clerks were nearly to a one Black. There were no supervisors on-site (and if could be helped, no cops). The Black working class run actually existing Greyhound on its own, getting various and sundry glitches worked out, including botched schedules and a bus that refused to start through the company smart-phonehigh-tech supervisionto which it was slaved. The drivers proved both good-natured and broaching no bullshit. They assured their charges and admonished misbehavior. They steered their buses, machine and people both, to their destinations.

Out of New Orleans, I caught the surprises I planned. I saw cranes roosting on rebar in Gulf wetlands suffusing the concrete pylons atop which the interstate ran. A dilapidated bed-and-breakfast along the biomorphic landscapeLa Belle Maisonswished by. The electrical grid hopped stanchion to stanchion until it disappeared into the fog of the sea. As if our mode of energy production was indeed infinite.

Jackson, named after the slaver and genocidal general, his statue only now to be removed from in front of City Hall, has been for decades running a center of experimentation in Black liberation. The history and the civil rights museums are stunning tributes to fierce resistance. I learned it was at the station our bus rolled into where twenty-seven Freedom Riders were arrested as soon as they arrived. A few years later an albeit titular Black Republic stretched over multiple counties in goddamn Mississippi. Today one can trace the through line not just for legal rights but self-determination and economic democracy toin no monolithMayors Chokwe Lumumba and Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the Jackson-Kush plan, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the New Afrikan Peoples Organization, June Hardwick, the Peoples Assembly, Rukia Lumumba, solidarity economies, the Amandia Education Project, the Take Back the Land campaign, Operation Black Belt, participatory budgeting, Tougaloo Community Farm, Adofo Minka, and Kali Akuno and the inimitable Cooperation Jackson.

The rural counties of Mississippi are powered by energy cooperatives run by boards of good ol boys that pass on energy costs to poor Black majorities for as much as half of family incomes, while, among other egregious examples, wiring private schools for free. The One Voice project works out of a building in Jackson1072 John R. Lynch Streetthat was the heart of the civil rights movement. Everybody passed through: Kwame Ture, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and thousands of others. Fifty years later and the fight continues along these new-century axes. One Voice is supporting efforts to break these boards by getting Black people elected. Out beyond a radical Black-run state capital, where the Confederate flag flew at the governors mansion until only this month, secret meetings and shady deals churn apartheid onward, fought against by an organically organized peoples movement. As I offered to a colleague who lives in Jackson on what first appeared an entirely different topicshe was being stymied by a board at a local institutionmany white people are terrified of Black excellence.