kaliflower’s Reviews > The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide > Status Update

What if humans didn't believe viruses and bacteria were at the bottom of the food pyramid, but at the top of it? Or between every step? What if we didn't imagine a species pyramid at all, but a species cycle - a round map without beginning or end, which we all share?

- Chapter Ten: Ride-Along, pages 227-228

We cannot continue with a world that warehouses people who are disabled or elderly, hiding them from view; that allows them to fester physically and emotionally and leaves them for dead when viruses circulate.

- Chapter Nine: Disability as Disposability, page 207

With America's HIV approach, the priority became protecting private pharma profits and intellectual property over providing public prophylaxis. Those who controlled the means of pharmacological production controlled access to life itself, and the ongoing AIDS crisis has continued to kill up to an estimated one million people a year globally.

- Chapter Eight: One in Two, page 185

Liberalism has built into the law many of the vectors that drive viral transmission, especially via the carceral state. This must be undone if we are to reduce the trauma of our current and future plagues, expand access to prophylaxis, and mitigate the trauma of social death.

- Chapter Seven: Cages, page 174

[ you're dirty . . . Just degenerate .] Not clean . Whether a person is queer, experiencing homelessness, struggling with addiction, or moving across borders to avoid war or starvation, the same few words are used to disparage the members of viral underclass around the world.

- Chapter Five: From Athens to Appalachia, page 127

[ you're dirty . . . Just degenerate . Not clean . Whether a person is queer, experiencing homelessness, struggling with addiction, or moving across borders to avoid war or starvation, the same few words are used to disparage the members of viral underclass around the world.

- Chapter Five: From Athens to Appalachia, page 127