It was, in one sense, laughable to suppose that I would ever stop thinking about the pandemic after the winter of 2020, but I did stop writing about it. I continued instead to consume it, through a fall down an ever-deepening rabbit holes. And it continued to consume me.
Many things happened to the online information landscape in this period, as the pandemic was officially declared over, both restrictions and services dropped, and (at least in the US) the inexorable rise of Trump and his coterie of tech oligarchs toward a second presidency began – not to mention the tectonic geopolitical shifts of the Ukraine and Palestine wars. Constructing a representative political spectrum of scientific and public health opinion from a single platform, as I did back in 2020 in an earlier post, would be impossible today, akin in its naïveté to the notion of Twitter as Habermasian public sphere back in the Arab Spring days. Platforms are fragmented, manipulated, and compromised beyond repair. But they did represent, for better or worse, the mediating informational landscape through which the pandemic took place. Even my own awareness of the airborne nature of the disease and the benefits of masking began, I’m not ashamed to admit, with Michael Osterholm’s appearance on Joe Rogan (viewed on YouTube late at night) – an ironic example of the remarkable reach that podcast had even then.
Looking back on the past five years, half a decade, the period crystallizes in a few distinct ways: first, as the ‘days of being online.’ I’m not ashamed of this, even though it did delay my work considerably and took months off my life I could have spent being more productive. When great historical change happens, it’s worth not looking away. The information I gathered kept me alive, if not quite sane. Like a chemotherapy drug, it saved me but at great personal cost – such treatments should always be stopped once the prescribed course is finished.
Second, as a well-defined interregnum between the crumbling of an old order and the terrifying revelation of the contours of the new. A singular crisis (the pandemic) transformed into a ‘polycrisis’ (along with inflation, war, and climate breakdown) and then into a ‘permacrisis’ that will define the rest of my lifetime on a planetary scale (though we should be mindful of Janet Roitman’s admonition). It comes into view, I imagine, how the twentieth century’s interwar once did to those who lived through it.
Third, as a time in my personal life when I got old and lost and gained many things: lost most friendships, the opportunity to have children and buy a house, valuable time I could have spent advancing my research (but here I discovered how hard it is to pivot in one’s expertise, and how important networking and institutional support is in this profession); but gained an awareness of what I truly value and the kind of life I could (and sometimes do) pursue with intention and meaning. I suspect I’m not alone in this respect, but living through a pandemic with eyes open will do that to anyone (as the characters in Camus’s La peste express so beautifully).
When drawing conclusions about what this period has meant for health and capitalism (the subject of this post), I have taken my cues from voices once considered radical on the suppression-mitigation spectrum, the ones who still advocate for protection and highlight the continuing toll taken by the virus: Julia Doubleday’s Substack posts on the end of public health and liberals’ complicity in pandemic denial, Nate Bear’s observations of societal ‘unmooring,’ and the excellent work done by the Death Panel podcast (coming from a solid disability history framework). I do think these perspectives rely on unexamined narratives of linear progress towards ‘justice’ (that do befit committed activists but do not map onto my inner understanding of the world), and also leave open the question of the state and the tensions between authoritarianism and mutual aid that drove so much of the Red/Green-to-Brown pipeline of the past few years (culminating in the Trump-RFK Jr. axis, as discussed below). So I will try to express where I am now, looking back at my earlier posts and reframing and recontextualizing the pandemic as I see it in early 2025. Most of these thoughts were first put to paper in the spring of 2024 in Europe, and updated in light of political developments in the US since then.
1. When it comes to the disease itself, I ended my October 2020 post by speculating on a future of low-to-medium endemicity, with COVID installed as a permanent fixture of the disease burden disproportionately affecting vulnerable and marginalized populations or popping up in localized outbreaks (much like tuberculosis, HIV, malaria, or indeed the third plague). In 2020, this was considered a hopelessly pessimistic, even alarmist, scenario. I could not have foreseen what would happen in 2021: the Delta wave (which unleashed shocking devastation in India in particular) in the spring, the waning of the vaccines against Delta in the summer (first demonstrated in Israeli studies), and finally the emergence of Omicron on a warm and sunny Thanksgiving Day (first identified in South Africa). Along with the fateful day of March 11, 2020 (when Trump shakily announced a Europe travel ban), I remember these three events – where I was and how I felt – as vividly as I do other epochal historical moments of my lifetime like 9/11. The fact that most people don’t speaks to the deliberately muddled media messaging around the pandemic.
I’ve now come to think of Omicron as a milestone in world history similar to the detonation of the first nuclear bomb on July 16, 1945 (so memorably depicted by Christopher Nolan in Oppenheimer) or the year 1952 (put forward as a specific starting date of the Anthropocene due to accumulating plutonium levels). If the Trinity test inaugurated a nuclear age, haunted by the existential fear of human extinction, Omicron marked the true start of the Virocene, an epoch when Angus Deaton’s ‘Great Escape’ is grinding to a halt and life expectancy and health gains since the Industrial Revolution have begun to reverse. The unstoppable tidal waves of sickness and disability set in motion by Omicron constitute a slow catastrophe that is just too big and too diffuse to even imagine for most people.
To put it more simply, we have never experienced a respiratory pathogen that is highly transmissible year-round and indefinitely causes excess morbidity across the entire global population. No historical parallel can help us fully understand it, in the same way that no analogies to warfare before the atomic bomb could capture the altered realities of nuclear conflict after 1945 (or that no climatological records, however extreme, can predict the future course and consequences of runaway anthropogenic climate change).
2. Part of the confusion around the virus that continues to persist lies in the underappreciation of intrinsic severity. Vulgarized pop virology and immunology (such as the notion that Omicron and its successors mutated to become ‘more transmissible and less lethal’) has shifted focus from the basic properties of the virus and the many ways it can (still) cause damage. True physiological adaptation to a persistent pathogen, as in bats, can happen but it takes thousands of years, never a few months. The mountain of scientific studies that explore SARS-CoV-2’s effects on almost every organ of the body, and the circulatory system in particular, provide ample mechanistic evidence of its dangers – much like measuring the teeth of a predator is a useful proxy for its risk to humans (regardless of how well we may believe it has been tamed).
Whenever I hear SARS-2 lumped in with the generic category ‘respiratory viruses,’ or compared with the flu (a once fringe Trumpian position roundly mocked by bien pensant liberals, now the orthodoxy of the medical and scientific establishment across the world), I often use the analogy of cats and tigers. Yes, they are both ‘felines,’ but that tells us little about the relative risks each poses to us. Anecdotally, one can have many pleasant encounters with a tiger that do not result in any harm, or be hurt or even killed by a cat. Yet it would be an insult to common sense and basic self-preservation to shrug our shoulders if tigers were as common as cats, left to roam in an out of homes and public spaces at will because they are ‘just felines.’ We know that tigers belong away from humans, and should be handled carefully by trained professionals if at all, whereas we can indeed ‘live with’ cats and even servals (common colds, seasonal flu, or RSV in this analogy), despite their sharp claws and occasionally nasty temperaments. If, somehow, millions of tigers were let loose upon the world, we would have to take extreme measures to protect ourselves as much as possible, rather than retroactively downgrading the threat because the situation was allowed to get bad. The analogy appears absurd only because we are much better at ascertaining the properties of a mammal than of an invisible virus, and because we have been deceived by political leaders and complicit virologists and epidemiologists who do possess the ability to ascertain the threat correctly.
3. Most people I meet think the first year and a half of the pandemic was exceptionally bad, leading to justified extreme measures (lockdowns, travel bans, vaccine mandates), and that around 2022 the pandemic became less bad and the measures correspondingly less justified. My view is precisely the opposite. The uncertainties of the first year warranted greater caution about how much society should be upended, whereas the sinking realization of permanent endemicity should have led to a ramping up of permanent mitigation (through a massive push for ventilation and redesigning public spaces, a normalization of masking indoors and flexible working arrangements, cultural changes to leisure practices and social norms, the expansion of infrastructures of research, care and treatment, and so on). For this reason, I did end up making common cause with so-called ‘lockdown skeptics’ in late 2020 to early 2021 but departed from them when their true agenda became clear later that year.
Here I claim no special insight as a historian and someone from within the credentialed academic community (with just two or three degrees of separation from many of these figures). I was simply duped, like millions of people around the world who followed the lockdown skepticism to New-Age-inflected fascism trajectory. I took at face value the claims of people like Vinay Prasad, Stefan Baral, and Monica Gandhi (or, in my field, Toby Green) to be dissident progressives concerned with the inequities of essential workers or the Global South. I hung on to the mantra of ‘resources before restrictions’ because it did align with my own convictions – only to realize that those who put forward this conceit had no intention to ever fight for any kind of ‘resources’ to be directed at mitigating the pandemic (not N95 respirators, tests, vaccines, or HEPA filters in buildings, and absolutely not any sort of confrontational political push for universal healthcare). They just meant business-as-usual.
4. So who gets the blame for the normalization of mass death and disability after 2022? My proportions have remained consistent: 40% goes to the government and public health establishment that makes policies and guides behavior (until the end of 2024, that means the Biden administration in the US), 40% to capitalists and their paid ‘merchants of doubt’ who push governments to abandon mitigation (that means Prasad et. al.), and 20% to ordinary people, who despite all the misinformation and societal pressure, still have the capacity and responsibility to act ethically and resist – again, as the characters of La Peste memorably do. On this latter point I differ with many progressives and Leftists, for whom it is important never to blame or stigmatize individuals (influenced by the precedent of HIV). But as much as I appreciate and share that concern, the failure to care for others and the self can never be fully excused – even and perhaps especially in the most difficult circumstances.
5. I have found it much harder to let go of the Illichian (via David Cayley or Dugald Hine) and Agambenian critique of the lockdowns as a state of exception, but its limits have been painfully brought to light. There was a kernel of truth and value to it in 2020, when we all felt the absurd weight of the state and its surveillance technologies bearing down on us. But the critique was ultimately directed toward the wrong target. The true Agambenian ‘bare life’ is the state of compromised health to which we are unwittingly doomed after repeat infections. It is the long COVID patient, debilitatingly or silently disabled, who falsely lives by merely existing – not being the victim of a ‘severe’ case or becoming a death statistic, but prevented nonetheless from a full and active life. In the world of 2020-21, when people took unusual and extreme actions to prevent death at all costs and states declared that to be their goal, the critique made some sense. In the post-2022 world, it is passé – today, permanent COVID (not permanent lockdown) constitutes ‘bare life.’
Here I will admit that the hopelessly misguided original public health messaging (to ‘stay at home’ rather than to go outside, to close off one’s world rather than to expand it) created this perverse outcome. It never ceases to amaze and baffle me how figures of the Left Conservative/New Age Right movement, who advocate decentralized, small-scale, low-tech, back-to-nature ‘trad’ living fail to see how the pandemic created a vital opening for their ideas – not only in opposition to the lockdowns but because of them. Being outside, not trapped in a gas-guzzling commute or stuffy office building in a ‘bullshit job,’ gave many people (myself included) a sense of profound personal freedom and fulfillment. Whereas biomedical technologies like vaccines were demonized as high-modernist attempts to surveil and control, the Corsi-Rosenthal box (a simple, low-cost engineering solution) and the DIY mask were perfect illustrations of the kinds of ‘intermediate technology’ championed by low- or anti-modernists. But then I remember that my experience was both idiosyncratically personal (like the prototypical convert, I believed only when I was ready to receive the Word) and marked by work-from-home privilege, and that most people did correctly associate lockdowns with confinement and restriction. When I opposed the lockdowns ‘as they really were,’ it was because I wanted everyone to have the opportunity to reject the status quo in an emancipatory sense, not rush mindlessly ‘back to normal.’
6. The lockdowns should be understood as the last gasp or authoritarian spasm of public health, a ‘zombie state’ briefly awakened from the torpor of slow neoliberal poison for one last hurrah – before a final death in the spring of 2022. But its excesses and exclusions were the same as those of the governments of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from colonial regimes to liberal welfare states to communist dictatorships. The pandemic was a reminder of what public health and state power used to be, both in terms of provision (Operation Warp Speed, free tests) and restrictions. The popular backlash was thus exclusively against the state, and not against capital as in 2008 (except in distorted and displaced ways like fixating on vaccines and pharmaceutical companies vs. real estate, airlines, restaurants, and other interests who stood to benefit from going ‘back to normal’). The strangeness of the lockdowns can be ascribed to the fact that SARS-2/COVID was the first global pandemic to unfold in a post-neoliberal and post-industrial era. The hastily awakened state remembered how to do certain things but no longer had the capacity or the instruments to do them, and it faced a population that no longer expected much of it. Hence the wild swing from ‘wartime emergency’ and ‘national sacrifice austerity’ mode in spring 2020 to laissez-faire two years later, which remains totally incomprehensible to most people.
Slowly making the pandemic disappear, as in the infamous color manipulations on CDC maps, did not appease skeptics and active conspiracists, assuaging their paranoia by trying to put the genie back in the bottle (as governments around the world foolishly hoped it would). Instead, it confirmed their worst fears – that the whole pandemic was a hoax, scam, or mirage manipulated by a power-hungry globalist élite – far more than actually following through on a ‘new normal’ of degrowth and constrained consumption (which would have confirmed that the élites believed what they said). In this narrative, it was heroic resistance that foiled the best laid plans of the globalists, who must now be punished with a show of counterforce to restore a purist utopia of untainted ‘natural’ selves and communities. This is the MAGA + MAHA project in the US, with clear fascist and eugenicist overtones.
7. The lockdowns exposed the fine line, if not dangerous overlap, between discourses of austerity and degrowth (I was not wrong to identify the Ceaușescu spirit in the original measures, which really did subordinate the economy to the state and paid the price with the sharpest fiscal and productivity crash in recorded history). The climate conversation, from peak oil to rewilding, got hopelessly entangled with the pandemic, building on extant dynamics from the protest-ridden 2010s (think gilets jaunes on the one hand, Extinction Rebellion on the other). Left critics of the lockdowns saw them as austerity (and were not entirely wrong to have done so), whereas those on the Right saw them as a frightening preview of what degrowth would mean (also not entirely wrong, as Branko Milanović explains).
Meanwhile, the provision of vaccines and tests (but not ventilation and building retrofitting) evoked the missing corner of the triangle, war production (or the Green New Deal) as Keynesian stimulus. I distinctly remember feeling the power of the (American) state when I drove into the requisitioned Six Flags amusement park for free mass vaccination, when I picked up free tests from the library, or when I received a signed check from the President. Many others no doubt felt the same, giving a complete lie to austerity rhetoric from the 2010s that universal healthcare or basic incomes were unattainable. Despite the hardships of the first year, by 2021 Americans were saving like never before and enjoying the benefits of a robust welfare net not seen for decades. When the measures began to be pulled back in early 2022, it sent a clear message: ‘Everything is possible, and yet nothing will happen.’ I remember equally vividly when the last COVID clinic closed in DC and feeling a sense of dull, impotent rage that has never left me – and has not, despite the Trump-led dismantling of public health, allowed me to forgive the Democratic Party.
I’ve had many conversations about ventilation over the past five years (I don’t plan to have any more for a while) that ended abruptly with ‘That sounds like a good idea but it’s never going to happen.’ The bitter irony, of course, is that large-scale engineering and architectural changes to buildings did happen in the past, in response to tuberculosis and the 1918 flu, only to be supplanted by the biomedical silver bullets of antibiotics and vaccines (the failure to satisfactorily ‘bury’ the McKeown hypothesis lies behind much of the widespread public confusion and distrust of medical expertise today).
8. The unresolved question of the origins of COVID stemmed from a related discursive paralysis about how to understand ‘nature’ in the Anthropocene. Zoonosis was conceptually foreordained by the One Health framework and could be spun as the ‘revenge of nature’ on an encroaching humanity (remember ‘We are the virus’ and the fetishization of wild animals taking over abandoned cities?). Lab leak, meanwhile, spoke to a different kind of ‘revenge of nature,’ namely the humbling of scientific hubris (the doyen of this theme, Michael Crichton, notably authored both Jurassic Park and State of Fear). Anti-mask arguments accordingly held that a mere man-made fabric (no matter how well designed or robustly tested) could not possibly stem the airborne flow of viruses (conceived as an unstoppable force of nature leading to the Arcadian equilibrium of ‘herd immunity’).
9. The pandemic, like all others in history, occurred in its own peculiar cultural, social, political, and discursive contexts. It is impossible to imagine the trajectory of HIV-AIDS in the United States, Southern Africa, or Eastern Europe apart from its emergence during deindustrialization and early neoliberalism in the 1980s. It is equally impossible to imagine the outbreak of the third plague pandemic in India outside of the ‘high noon’ of the Raj (recurring cholera epidemics provide a contrast case – but was cholera different due to epidemiology or history?). SARS-2/COVID was thus not only intertwined with climate anxiety, the end of neoliberalism, and the rise of the transnational populist/fascist Right, but also with digital technology (already busily colonizing everyday life in the 2010s and then enabling the lockdowns), BLM and racial justice claims, the return of inflation and crime, and eventually the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars.
Municipal and state mask bans, which began to appear across the US in 2024 (including in blue states) and will no doubt accelerate in the near future under Trump, demonstrate how such conflation operates. For petty state officials like New York mayor Eric Adams, who have long dissembled about the efficacy and purpose of masking, and who embrace digital surveillance as a tool of control, the twinned threats of crime and opposition to Israel justify a remarkably intrusive and totalitarian ‘right to the face’ (analogous to the veil controversies of the 2000s, when the visual scan of the Other was bizarrely exalted as a cornerstone of Enlightenment reason and democratic citizenship). But pro-Palestinian activists and actual street criminals are not blameless – again, as the progressive Left would have it. By wearing masks to conceal their identities at outdoor protests and inconsistently using health as a pretense for doing so, they weaken even further what should be the accepted social meaning of the respirator – personal protective equipment (PPE) used by individuals when exposed to a hazard if the hazard cannot be removed. A similar unfortunate error occurred from rudimentary misinterpretations of poor-quality studies of cloth face coverings back in 2020, when masks (of any kind) became symbols of ‘care’ worn ‘for others.’ This poisoned the well both scientifically (how could a filter work in one direction but not the other, skeptics rightly wondered?) and discursively (by denying a useful argument for increased uptake based on rational individual self-interest).
The fact that the pandemic began at the exact end of a turbulent decade (late in 2019) and exactly thirty years after 1989, is almost too good to be true in terms of bookending a historical period. This temporal conjunction alone, albeit subconsciously, enhanced visceral popular reactions to the pandemic (like Indians’ millenarian expectations of Kali Yuga in the bleak, famine-ridden 1890s). Yet the event-ness of the pandemic, so discrete and in such sharp relief with what came before and after, in turn allows it to be bounded and closed off, forgotten by some and remembered by others as a mediatized global headline (akin to a terrorist attack or natural disaster) rather than a genuine paradigm shift (the permanent introduction of a new disease in humans, the end of a global economic and political order).
It is commonly believed among the dwindling ‘COVID-conscious’ crowd on social media that Davos élites, athletes, politicians, and celebrities continue to protect themselves in secret through testing and treatment while the rest of us suffer. In part this stems from some good old-fashioned occupational health protections gained through collective bargaining in industries like Hollywood, and some of it from occasional glimpses of HEPA filters. But it is nothing more than a self-soothing conspiracy theory. Global élites are just as willing as ordinary people to become repeatedly infected, subject to the death drive (Thanatos) that Freud identified in Civilization and its Discontents, on the verge of a catastrophic global war. We really are, as they said back in 2020, ‘all in this together’ – but not in a good way.
10. What have I learned, then? That the biopolitical state of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (capitalist, socialist, or colonial) has morphed into an unwieldy but destructive necropolitical state-capital assemblage that seeks to let and make die. A question that I hope I can answer in my future research, if I ever get there, is about how older biopolitical states and corporations decided whether their workers and subjects should live or die – rethinking the origins of occupational and public health from the other side of their decline. As human labor is automated away by AI, and the tidal waves of viral infection ebb and flow, the future is grimly clear. But the past can still surprise us.
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