Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19

by Rob Wallace

The COVID-19 pandemic shocked the world. It shouldn’t have. Since this century’s turn, epidemiologists have warned of new infectious diseases. Indeed, H1N1, H7N9, SARS, MERS, Ebola Makona, Zika, and a variety of lesser viruses have emerged almost annually. But what of the epidemiologists themselves? Some bravely descended into the caves where bat species hosted coronaviruses, including the strains that evolved into the COVID-19 virus. Yet, despite their own warnings, many of the researchers appear unable to understand the true nature of the disease—as if they are dead to what they’ve seen.

Dead Epidemiologists is an eclectic collection of commentaries, articles, and interviews revealing the hidden-in-plain-sight truth behind the Global capital drove the deforestation and development that exposed us to new pathogens. Rob Wallace and his colleagues—ecologists, geographers, activists, and, yes, epidemiologists—unpack the material and conceptual origins of COVID-19. From deepest Yunnan to the boardrooms of New York City, this book offers a compelling diagnosis of the roots of COVID-19, and a stark prognosis of what—without further intervention—may come.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Health, Politics, Ecology, Biology, History

248 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2020

Reviews

[The Conspiracy is Capitalism · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dead: “public health” isolated from systems (capitalism + ecology)

…So here I was, studying epidemiology, and we get hit with the greatest pandemic in generations. You would think this would be motivating, but I kept being distracted by the obvious question not addressed: what effects does capitalist destruction of our planet and social imagination have on public health? I felt like I was learning how to use a microscope to examine the sun.
…Enter evolutionary biologist/epidemiologist Rob Wallace:

Multinational agribusiness, mining, logging, and real estate chop at the tree of life for greed first and foremost, the planet and its people bedamned. Pleased at the ruins it surveys, the system, tended to by dead epidemiologists, served up COVID-19 on its proverbial arm. Upon this perch, the virus now leisurely eats through humanity alive. [emphasis added]

Highlights:
1) Origins: exotic or systemic?
--“Wet market”, “bush meat”, “hot zone”…the narrative we are fed regarding outbreaks is that they have exotic origins (COVID, Ebola, Zika…. conveniently, the last pandemic H1N1/09 Swine Flu is omitted). “Absolute geographies” (i.e. GPS pin-points) conveniently isolates and focuses blame on indigenous/smallholder practices.
--We are fed a similar narrative regarding poor countries: why are they so poor? The assumption is that there must be some socio-cultural defect resulting in their situation. All we can do is be charitable and hope they can learn from our better example.
…Of course, this completely obscures the relations between poor and rich countries, where rich countries plunder and “kick away the ladder” to prevent poor countries rising in competition: (1) The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions and (2) Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.
--Now, let’s re-consider outbreaks using “relational geographies”: it turns out indigenous/smallholder practices are not only driven deeper into wildlife ecologies from displacement (deforestation, mining, etc. destroying local biodiversity), but also increasingly embedded in global commodity chains/circuits. This makes outbreaks that would normally fizzle out locally now spillover to the “capital centers” that funded the displacements. Neoliberal gutting of social services further escalates the outbreak.
--Also: Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction

2) Agribusiness farming industrial diseases:
--The best mainstream voices (ex. Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance) recognize the encroachment of nature and neoliberal dismantling of social services, but lack a deeper critique of agribusiness. In a liberal worldview (i.e. technocratic progress naturalizing capitalism), “globalization” seems largely inevitable (along with “growth”, “efficiency”, “overpopulation”, “inequality”, etc.). So, there’s a divide between Garrett’s Ebola: Story of an Outbreak vs. Wallace’s Neoliberal Ebola: Modeling Disease Emergence from Finance to Forest and Farm (or consider H1N1/09 Swine Flu, which Wallace calls “NAFTA Flu”).
…There lacks the social imagination to see alternatives away from one of the most disturbing businesses. Every stage from livestock (stop and think of this term) genetics to shipment has been optimized (“efficiency”) for profit (which necessitates externalizing costs/risks onto everyone else), resulting in drugged, diseased, tortured beings carrying the maximum amount of flesh, surviving just long enough to be butchered. No science fiction writer can imagine such intricacies to cruelty; it takes the mass psychosis of the market system to conjure such abstract atrocities.
…Monocultured genetics with traumatized immune systems hoarded together en masse with high throughput and transported widely, this recipe for crisis is the opposite of biodiversity's checks-and-balances. Farms are spaceships, unconcerned with local ecologies, while workers enter in hazmat spacesuits. We are wasting our miracle drug of antibiotics to dose animals for growth (not health); novel bacteria and viruses continually decimate livestock populations (costs pushed onto farmers/smallholders), gambling on the next jump to humans (ex. H1N1/09, H1N2v, H3N2v, H5N1, H5N2, H5Nx, H6N1, H7N1, H7N3, H7N7, H7N9, H9N2).
--Also: Marxist “metabolic rift”: John Bellamy Foster, Ian Angus, Mike Davis

3) The fracturing of “imperial epidemiology”:
--Using a World-Systems framework, Wallace sees the West’s Neoliberal phase (starting in 1970s) as the back end of the cycle of accumulation (i.e accumulation starts with infrastructure and commodity production, reaches a peak of overproduction & overaccumulation, and finally “cashes out” into cannibalism).
--During the ascension, the new US empire took on the leading role in “imperial epidemiology” to secure (“biosecurity”) and clean up after its burgeoning global infrastructure and production. Trump is the most visible sign of abandonment. Also mentioned: Obama’s role protecting agribusiness during swine flu, Anthony Fauci’s maneuvering since Reagan-era AIDS, and recent missteps by Michael T. Osterholm (Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs) and John Ioannidis (https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what...), etc.
…Finally, contrasting Western-centric veganism/urbanism/lab-meat technocracy with the agroecology of food sovereignty/farmer autonomy/livestock diversity (ex. La Via Campesina) ...Pandemic Research for the People (social research!), etc. See: A People’s Green New Deal

Lowlights/Missing:
1) This “book” is a compilation of articles/interviews, so it is fragmented and uneven. Some articles are academic, with plenty of Foucauldian social-science jargon mixed with scientific theories. Overall, this lacks the accessible foundations to engage the unconvinced. Try this interview: https://youtu.be/pIhKzUnWEas
2) Unpacking “anti-vaxx” (and it's opposite: “vaccine nationalism”), Big Pharma, Big Gov, Bill Gates, etc. is absent. Binary thinking can lead us astray in our messy world of contradictions. My go-to on the first 2 has been Ben Goldacre, who carefully unravels the systemic (thus often hidden!) harms of Big Pharma (esp. publication bias hiding negative results, advertising > R&D, and global patenting regime preventing affordable generics) while not falling down sensationalized rabbit holes (Bad Media, certain “alternative medicine”); also, social trust around vaccines:
-I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That
-Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks
-Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients
3) “Whatever its faults, Cuba has long been on the cutting edge of public health innovations despite its comparative poverty.: Wallace’s overall anti-imperialist framing is indeed a highlight, so it’s alarming to see such wording as “whatever its faults”. If this seems like a minor slip, it just shows how much soft-imperialist socdems control the Western “Left” narrative, where even an anti-imperialist leftist tip-toes around Cuba regardless of the context(!) and take a centrist approach. “Ideological censorship” is rampant (https://youtu.be/6jKcsHv3c74). I much prefer the Vijay Prashad/Michael Parenti approach to anti-imperialism:
-Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism
-The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
-playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS...

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rob Wallace has been going on about the dangers of pandemics, escaping viruses, agricapitalism and the like for many years. In 2013 he even bought an N95 mask as a response to a developing avian influenza outbreak. Although it ended up at the back of a cupboard, as he puts it:
‘So out-of-step Rob circa 2013 helped sourly vindicated Rob 2020’
This is a collection of essays, articles, interviews and commentaries all published/collected during the first six to eight months of the pandemic. Consequently you do get a sense of development throughout the book. Wallace also charts the arrival of many new pathogens in the last thirty years or so, including African swine fever, Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, Cyclospora, and Ebola, E-coli, foot - and - mouth disease (not entirely new), hepatitis E, Listeria, Nipah virus, Q fever, Salmonella, Vibrio, Yersinia, Zika and a variety of influenza variants. Many scientists have been expecting this for a while and we were shockingly ill-prepared. As Wallace says:
“near-nothing real was done about any of them. Authorities spent a sigh of relief upon each reversal and immediately took the next roll of the epidemiological dice, risking a snake eyes of maximum virulence and transmissibility.”
Wallace argues that the development of these viruses is not just about genetics, but also about deforestation, the commercialisation of agriculture (not just meat here but other commodities as well), large concentrations in agriculture (like the seven storey hog hotels in China): the whole panoply of big agriculture, but also the trade in bush meat and wild animals like pangolins and bats. Very pertinently Wallace says:
"agribusiness is at war with public health. And public health is losing"
This is all done for profit. The food chains we have and the concentrated nature of agriculture mean there are no natural firebreaks to prevent the spread of viruses and their mutations.
Wallace marshals his facts well and outlines the problem well. He isn’t sure where this particular virus came from (apart from China of course) and there are several possibilities, but he is clear that most governments have managed the pandemic particularly badly. He is also clear that there are likely to be more viruses on the way.
He does propose some solutions which are essentially socialist in nature. One solution he does not propose is moving to entirely plant based agriculture as he sees this as a northern Americo/Eurocentric solution which would case great damage to pastoral farmers, mainly in the South living traditional and sustainable lifestyles. Wallace argues that solutions have to be small and local and driven by those who work in agriculture and on the land. This is rather a salutary read. We did all this to ourselves and there is no real sign yet we are capable of changing path. This isn’t an easy read and I skim read some of the more technical bits, but the message is clear and I think correct.

[Frank Keizer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an incredibly well-researched book with roots in critical epidemiology and marxist political ecology, written for an academic audience. But its tenets and perspectives are fundamental for any turn (already happening locally around the world) towards what is here called 'pandemic research for the people', that has the collective wellbeing (and collectively owned and managed wellbeing) of the population as its priority, not the vested interests of agrocapital propped up by the neoliberal state-sponsored 'dead epidemiologist' from the title, who serve a deadly normality. This is a long-winded sentence, all I want to say is go read this book for an ecosocialist perspective on the COVID-19 crisis and a way out of it that is able to prevent deadly pathogens from arising in the first place, through farmer autonomy, food sovereignty and agroecologies that don't extirpate the land.

[Toni · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's no grand story here about COVID-19 that you would not be able to tease out from reading a bunch of scientific paper abstracts and going back to the general theory advanced by Rob Wallace & co. for years. That is, the theory of how globalized industrial agriculture has created a veritable breeding ground for hyper-virulent diseases, and how we can only understand this "pandemic age" by understanding the workings of agricultural capital.

What I mean is there is no radically new material in this book that Wallace has not been dealing with before. But with this book we have the most up-to-date material by specialists in their field, doing their best to make it accessible for the lay reader and are independent enough to repeat the stories that make mainstream epidemiology uneasy.

A year into the pandemic, and the general public even in the most literate, overdeveloped countries of the world is still by large ignorant about the structural causes of the virus.

This is probably the best cross-disciplinary literature there is on the pandemic at the moment. In a year or two, perhaps more depending on how research into the origins of the virus will advance, it will possibly be surpassed. In all likelihood by the very same authors, as it seems (and this is part of the book's point) not a lot of other epidemiologists are working on it. Mainstream, well-funded and corporate epidemiology is fully occupied understanding how the fire is spreading through the building, instead of understanding what started the fire. As it is very likely that we will see other new hyper-virulent diseases come on the world stage, as long as the ecological fire walls are so weak and the food industry resembles a veritable petri dish for epidemics, it seems pretty important to do something about this.

This is not an easy read if you're not accustomed to reading some scientific literature, esp. in the biology department. But the way of theorizing is absolutely necessary to understand the big picture: we are lucky to have researchers with a popular ethic synthesizing the political economy of agriculture with technical fields like agroecology and farming, epizoology and evolutionary biology.

[Constantinos Kalogeropoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rob Wallace and company serve up an illuminating analysis of capitalism's culpability in the covid pandemic. From agribusiness' farming and livestock cultivation designed for maximum profits while simultaneously selecting for the most virulent pathogens, to the circuits of finance capital pushing development deeper into virus rich environments increasing the likelihood of spillover, to the global supply chains spreading these viruses across the world in days, and austerity-neoliberalism's destruction of the commons leaving us unable to cope with the fruits of capitalism's profit seeking.

[Max]

discussion of covid from a perspective basically compatible with ecofeminism! neat

[Zack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rob Wallace's writings are important and largely well written. The two areas he covers extensively which I'm most interested in are: first, the role of environmental destruction in driving an increasing rate of zoonotic spillover; second, the role of big agriculture and intensive farming in not only acting as reservoirs for pathogens, but giving rise to new, deadlier, strains.

I actually think Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science was better in some ways, although it predates COVID-19. (See my review here: https://bit.ly/bf-bf ) This might be because I read that one first, and this one repeats some of the content — with good reason. I think it might also be, ironically, that Rob Wallace tries to be more political in this one. His politics are eclectic but seem a bit third-worldists, and is not what I'm interested in him for.

Nonetheless, very worth a read, and I think pretty solid stuff. He seems like a reputable scientist, and has consulted for the CDC and FAO, and the essays in the books are co-authored with others. I am however yet to find an independent assessment of his books by another scientist in the field. I've put out some feelers to get that!

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Good
- there is not much critical epidemiology out there, making this highly interdisciplinary collection of essays a valuable contribution already
- 'Red Vegans versus Green Peasants' is required reading for any left liberal plant-based-diet advocate
- Same goes for the critique of the ecohealth, onehealth, and biosecurity paradigms for any clinician/public health enthusiast
- COVID19 may have its proximal origins in a lab or in increasingly capitalized wild food production, but Wallace argues convincingly that this debate ignores the longterm root of pandemics in industrial agriculture and the capitalist-colonial relation between human and non-human nature
- meaningfully mitigating pandemics means discarding hegemonic approaches to 'biosecurity' and instead setting one's strategic horizon at the end of capitalist accumulation and alienation - agribusiness may be adaptable but pathogens are more so

The Missing
- this is not a book about tactics or strategy - read next to Max Ajl's 'A People's Green New Deal' for some hints at who the agents of change might be that would bring about an agroecological society
- challenging to follow in places as it flips into high-jargon evolutionary biology mode, yet I don't feel better able to explain beyond a very shallow level how species diversity creates a natural firebreak against disease outbreaks

Quotes
'...while clearly important to our understand of the history of this particular pandemic, whether the SARS-2 outbreak began at the infamous Wuhan market itself, farther out on the Wuhan wild foods circuit, or in another provincial circuit altogether, including along the Yunnan-to-Guangdong trade route - all increasingly interconnected by record air and rail travel - is beside the point. Nor does it really matter if bat guano farming, hog husbandry on the hinterlands, or hte pangolin trade is to blame.
Instead, we need to readjust our conceptual sights on the processes by which increasingly capitalized landscapes turn living organisms into commodities and entire production chains - animal, producer, processor, and retailer - into disease vectors.'

'Our general theory of neoliberal disease emergence, including, yes, in China, combines:
- global circuits of capital;
- deployment of said capital destroying regional environmental complexity that keeps virulent pathogen population growth in check;
- the resulting increases in the rates and taxonomic breadth of spillover events;
- the expanding periurban commodity circuits shipping these newly spilled-over pathogens in livestock and labor from the deepest hinterland to regional cities;
- the growing global travel (and livestock trade) networks that deliver the pathogens from said cities to the rest of the world in record time;
- the ways these networks lower transmission friction, selecting for the evolution of greater pathogen deadliness in both livestock and people;
- and, among other impositions, the dearth of reproduction on-site in industrial livestock, removing natural selection as an ecosystem service that provides real-time (and nearly free) disease protection.'

[Nathaniel Flakin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been following Wallace on social media, and he combines deep knowledge of science with an anticapitalist perspective. He can explain to a broad audience how industrial farming is leading to the emergence of new pathogens. I wondered how he had managed to publish a book so soon, and the answer is: this is a collection of writing from very different sources. One chapter might be a polemical Facebook post and the next a scientific paper full of terms that took me some effort to understand. I would definitely recommend this book — but it was a bigger challenge than I had been expecting based on Wallace's more popular articles! Scientific footnotes, for example, make up more than half the book. I think Wallace offers a convincing argument against reformist "ecomodernists" who believe that socialism can be based on industrial farming, simply by changing the ownership structure. However, I did not find the alternative strategy focussed on small farmers entirely convincing either. For me, what was missing in the book was the question of political power, or state power. The spirit was more like the Zapatistas, Via Campesina, or "change the world without taking power." While such strategies claim that we can sidestep the question of state power and build a new world without confronting and destroying the capitalist state, autonomist projects are almost inevitably coopted by reformist governments, as long as these governments have the right discourse. A good example of this: the governments in Bolivia and Venezuela rely on mega-mining and agribusiness as much as other Latin American governments — but they talk about indigenous rights and peasants while implementing neoliberal policies, and therefore enjoy the support of many leftists. This kind of neoliberalism with a postcolonial discourse is not the way forward either. So while I agree that socialism will need to be based more on organic farming than on capitalism's spcaeship-style hog factories, getting rid of such factories will require the working class forming it's own government. This does not mean a reformist government creating a "pro-people's state", but a working class creating its own revolutionary, commune-like semi-state in alliance with peasants and small farmers. Now I have focussed mainly on a criticism that makes up a tiny part of the book. So let me emphasize again that this is an important book for understanding how capitalism leads to pandemics. It is just a bit vague when it comes to questions of state power and socialist revolution.

[Dave Lambert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for 2020...

[Andylay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very current but also with lots of the build up to the current pandemic. I prefered it to his Big Farms.... Great that there is someone making sense of all this! I certainly now understand the situation much better than before I read this book.

[Alyx Z · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got up to page 158 and stopped because I was having panic attacks and despairing