Into the Bat Cave

 “Dead Epidemiologists – on the Origins of Covid-19,” by Rob Wallace, 2020

This is an excellent lyrical and Marxist take on Covid-19 by a scientist who has studied infectious diseases, especially pandemics, for years.  His contribution is to detail the links between animal and corporate and industrial agriculture for the development of pathogens that jump from animals to humans.  Most conventional scientists in the U.S. or China who study the issue compartmentalize the medical and the economic, breaking any link between the two.  Wallace does not. 

Wallace’s key insights across all these outbreaks is that industrial animal agriculture acts as a ‘petri dish’ for the development of new mutations due to overcrowding; that capital-led deforestation and new ‘development’ intrude on wild animal habitats, allowing for previously isolated diseases to jump to humans; that every single animal species is now being commodified as food, potions, trophies or in some other way.  This is all powered by the circulation of capital worldwide.  Local infections in Wuhan or Yunan forests spread to semi-urban spaces and become global due to the imperial Pangaea of air travel, shipping, trucks and trains.

The book reads as an accurate narrative of the Covid-19 pandemic from January to July 2020, unfolding in real time through notes on MROnline, interviews, Monthly Review articles, Patreon and public presentations to Regeneration Midwest.  Wallace notes that C-19s mortality rate is far above seasonal flues.  He realizes that without a vaccine, even a 1-2% death rate could result in millions dying.  He advocates that non-essential work be shut down in high-transmission areas.  Wallace links this outbreak with previous ones – H1N1 and its many variants, along with African swine flu, SARS-1, Ebola, MERS, Zika, HIV, avian influenza and others.      

Wallace looks at various methods to contain the virus.  While pin-pointing all of the Trump government’s murderous practice, he knows that ‘context is critical’ in a pandemic. ‘Toggling’ between health and the economy or herd immunity in the U.S. ignores the prior lack of a nationalized, organized health care system, which makes both methods a recipe for disaster.  He also advocates neighborhood mutual aid, free vaccines and full unemployment and health coverage for those affected, which is the working class in its various colors and nationalities.  He even pokes at Dr. Fauci.

Wallace and his cohorts lean to the short, severe but effective means used in China and try to translate what that would mean in the U.S. and countries like Italy, which was hit first in Europe.  He points out that the response in China is because it is an up-and-coming economy, compared to the decaying cannibalistic economies of Britain and the U.S.  In a question about India’s severe anti-proletarian lockdown, he says that each country’s individual response is based on preserving power, not handling the disease.

Wallace looks at how this virus traveled along food routes, ending in rural U.S. meat-packing plants where the capitalists and their government force lower color castes to work, no matter the consequences.  He parses the source of this particular virus.  He concludes based on the evidence that it did come from the wild animal trade and specifically bats and pangolins in southwestern China, not a lab accident.  The Chinese authorities, in their analysis, ignore the role of agri-business, the wild foods sector and traditional Chinese medicines.  But Wallace also looks at how capital and their governments are opening labs that experiment with viruses for profit and biowarfare, with inevitable accidents related to ‘gain of function’ experiments.  The specific lab in Wuhan was partially funded by a U.S. non-profit, EcoHealth Alliance, a joint project with the Chinese, as well as the NIH.  The problem is that an accusation of a lab-origin mixes with global power politics so that it is difficult to determine the truth.  Wallace sees these allegations as part of Sinophobic weaponization by Trump.    

Wallace introduces readers to terms like biopolitics, biosecurity and biocontrol.  He points out that the presence of the ACE2 enzyme in the body – more prevalent in males, the elderly and those with chronic conditions like high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes – makes one more susceptible to Covid-19.  

Agro-Ecology in Action

Longer Term Solutions

The first of Wallace’s long-term solutions is a return to small-holder agriculture, which has been shown to be more productive, less damaging and less expensive than large scale corporate farming.  It would result in a repopulation of rural areas. The second is the mass adoption of agro-ecologic methods – organic, diverse, intercrop, indigenous, sustainable, small-scale.  His concept of ‘small holder’ in these articles (definition unknown) seems to be mostly limited to present market methods, not cooperative farming, government aid or planned production.  These aspects are only mentioned once.  Mostly he comes off as a proponent of small farmers and pastoralists as part of a ‘disalienation’ of man and nature.  His main target is industrial farming and big capital’s support of those methods.  He details in an excellent chapter how capital is bio-forming the world, including details on the cruel and ‘scientific’ forms of industrial animalia. 

The weakest part of the book is Wallace’s opposition to what he calls ‘red’ vegetarianism/veganism, with a mouthful of hyperbole and straw mein.  His real attack is on bourgeois veganism and top-down bureaucratism, but he fails to make the distinction.  Reducing meat eating would decimate corporate animal agriculture, increase available food, decrease animal torture while providing a large reduction in global carbon production.  His own text partially explains this in the operation of animal factories.  Wallace claims not to know what small holder agro-ecologic methods would do to the volume of meat eating.  In a capitalist economy the ‘industrial’ meat industry is directly connected to an industrial-level of meat eating.

The mass consumption of animals is part of the 6^th species extinction, global warming, food insecurity via export economies and biodiversity loss, as well as providing global pathways to epidemics – all part of the commodification of nature on the practical and ideological plane.  It should have nothing to do with Tunisian camel herders, Nunavut seal hunters, nomadic Bedouins, banning animal agriculture, compulsory veganism or lab meat.  It’s as if Wallace has isolated one compartment of science from another.  It is far more significant what McDonalds, ADM and Smithfield are doing, as he knows.  Wallace’s attack on mechanistic social-democratic versions of a rural program are justified and accurate.  But I suspect “La Via Campesina” is not really a 5^th International as that term has been historically known.  Nor is his stance that China is state capitalist based on facts he presents.  But those are all far-side issues.

This book describes a pandemic acting as a function of capital gone ‘wild.’  It is excellent, unique and well-written, understandable by non-biologists.  Wallace has spoken twice at May Day Books, based on his prior book “Big Farms Make Big Flu.”  May Day carries current and back issues of Monthly Review with Rob’s articles in them, along with his first book. 

Prior blog reviews on science, use the blog search box, upper left:  “The Tragedy of American Science,” “People’s History of Science,” “Reason in Revolt,” “Ten Assumptions of Science,” “Fashionable Nonsense – Post-Modern Intellectuals’    Abuse of Science,” “A Redder Shade of Green – Intersections of Science and Socialism,”  “The Fifth Risk,” “Ubiquity,” “The Emotional Lives of Animals,” “There is Only One Race” or the phrase “Big Bang.”   Also:  “A Foodies Guide to Capitalism,” “What is the Matter With the Rural U.S.?” “Grocery Activism,” “Salt Sugar Fat,” “Civilization Critical,” “Shrinking the Technosphere,” “The Sixth Extinction.”  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

February 7, 2021

May Day Covid hours:  1-5 P.M. except Sunday.  Knock if door locked, as it is locked due to recent robberies.