Pandemic at Large

An awful lot of nonsense lands in my email inbox, but every now and again, amongst various claims and counterclaims about “misinformation”, or war propaganda dressed up as journalistic comment, something pops up which catches my eye or excites my interest. Such an item was a scholarly article entitled The Folly of Immunological Determinism? by Gary Feinman and Stacy Drake, details in link below.

 The article takes issue with the current thinking that the pandemic holocaust that took place in the Americas following the invasion from Europe from the 16^th century on was due to local immunological “naivety”, ie the local people hadn’t been exposed to the kind of pathogens from domestic livestock etc that the Euro-Africans had; it claims that far too little attention has been paid to the slow socio-economic disruption caused by the incomers, not only in terms of their military aggressiveness but in terms of their introduction of differing work practices and socio-economic  habits which impacted on local people and their traditions and well-established and spectacularly successful agricultural practices, thus creating conditions whereby the natural resistance to disease in indigenous populations was drastically lowered.

It puts forward an interesting, if debatable, parallel with what we witnessed during the Covid pandemic, summarised as follows (quote):

“No matter how comforting it is for certain leaders and governments to try to apportion blame for Covid-19’s tragic consequences on exogenous contamination and the perils of immunological determinism, the highly disproportionate effects across countries belie this simple deterministic explanation. A multivariate, socio-political, and contingent suite of causes surely is at play….. To date, most of the contemporary nations with poor Covid-19 responses and outcomes are either autocratic regimes (Russia) or countries (United States, India, Brazil, United Kingdom, France) that have moved toward less democratic, authoritarian governance during the past decade, a shift marked by lessened concern for broad public welfare initiatives and a diminishment of the role of expertise in governmental policy and practice.”

It’s quite a generalisation, and I think the article was written before the pattern of the pandemic had entirely played out, but I guess what caught my attention was the association with a notion already well discussed by those of us who are dubious about the wisdom of routine mass vaccination campaigns. Vaccination is hailed as the great technological saviour of countless lives, without that much attention being paid to the likely origins of many of the epidemics it has targeted with such “success”. Social disruption due to de-population of rural areas and the destruction of rural economies was – and indeed still is – probably a greater factor in creating the conditions where epidemics occur than some mysterious advent of virus or infection out of nowhere. The diseases in question have been around for a long time, and for the most part coped with by human populations: what turns them deadly are the good old factors of oppression, greed, and inequality due to people being deprived of what was once regarded as their birthright. Deprived by whom? you may enquire. Well, basically by anyone who acquires the power to put one over them! Concentration of populations into urban or metropolitan centres continues on a worldwide scale, and whatever fancy socio-economic language is used to explain it, Power, whether exercised on a petty or a grand scale, is likely the great granddaddy Pandemic, and it’s still raging….

https://www.academia.edu/44835549/The_Folly_of_Immunological_Determinism?email_work_card=thumbnail