Capitalist agriculture practices have created the conditions for new diseases and pandemics to develop and spread
Five years ago, a killer was on the loose and making its way to Britain, passing from person to person, carried on ships and jets. The NHS first detected the new strain of coronavirus in January 2020.
The British state’s legendary unpreparedness for a pandemic allowed the new disease, soon to be known as Covid-19, to spread without inhibitions. Basic preventative measures were met by delay and deliberate government obstruction.
The cost of inaction was high. By the end of 2022 Britain had seen more than 20 million infections, and some 177,180 people had died.
All the while, politicians claimed that “lessons would be learned”. And, in recent years, there have been reports and inquiries, all of which were meant to ensure that we were better prepared “next time”.
These offered nothing but false reassurance. Scientists now say we are likely heading towards a new disaster, in some ways worse than Covid. Among the main threats to human health is H5N1, or bird flu.
The disease primarily affects birds but is known to have spread to other animals, and on occasion, to humans too. Bird flu has killed more than half of the over 900 people it is known to have been infected since 2003. If caught, it is far more dangerous to humans than Covid.
Yet the deadly virus continues to spread through dairy herds in the United States—with very little basic monitoring—and continues to infect a small but growing number of people.
Public health experts fear that H5N1 will mutate so that it can be carried person to person like seasonal flu viruses. If that happens, we are really in trouble.
The US Department of Agriculture announced last month that the virus had been detected in a pig farm. Scientists have long worried about this as pigs can also catch human flu viruses, leading to the possibility that bird flu combines with a strain that can spread between humans.
The state’s lack of pandemic preparations reflects how little has really changed since pre-Covid times—and how the priorities of the system remain centred on profits rather than people.
That complacency can be seen in a wave of government appointments in both the US and Britain.
For example, Sir Chris Wormald was a senior civil servant helping to decide Britain’s pandemic policy in 2020. He compared Covid to chickenpox and wanted a “herd immunity” strategy of letting the virus infect people without hindrance.
Wormald even rubbished the government advice that people with symptoms should stay at home. He should not be allowed near government again. Yet last month Keir Starmer made Wormald the cabinet secretary, Britain’s top civil servant.
In the US, the situation is even worse. Donald Trump was president during the first phases of Covid and produced one of the worst state responses of any wealthy nation. According to a report in the Lancet medical journal, in the first year of the pandemic the US could have averted more than 40 percent of Covid deaths. Instead, over 470,000 Americans died that year.
Rather than quickly enacting public health protection, Trump spread conspiracy theories, encouraged false remedies, discouraged mask wearing and undermined scientists seeking to combat the spread of the virus.
His supporters denounced anti-Covid measures as a form of “socialism”. In the end, only the availability of safe and effective vaccines stopped Covid from reaping a much higher toll.
But now, not only is Trump heading back to office, but he has nominated anti-vaccine politicians for the most important jobs in disease prevention. He wants Robert F Kennedy Jr to become the next US health secretary.
Kennedy will be joined by Dave Weldon, who Trump is nominating to lead the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Both men endorse debunked theories that blame vaccines for autism and chronic illnesses, and both have accused the CDC of “covering up” evidence that this is so.
Five years ago, when a measles outbreak hit Samoa, Kennedy wrote to the country’s prime minister to tell him that this disease was caused by vaccines. The swirl of misinformation meant Samoa’s vaccination rates had fallen to fewer than a third of eligible one year olds. Some 80 people died, including many children.
Kennedy has praised anti-vaxxer Sherri Tenpenny, who thinks vaccines make people magnetic.
The consequences of this kind of thinking could be very high. “It is a fantasy to think we can lower vaccination rates and herd immunity in the US and not suffer recurrence of these diseases,” says Gregory Poland, of the Atria academy of science and medicine.
“One in 3,000 kids who get measles is going to die. There’s no treatment for it. They are going to die.”
And Kennedy continues to spread myths about Covid even now. He said at a press event last year that, “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Real research, however, shows that all ethnicities are susceptible to Covid infection, and that social class is a key indicator of the likelihood of contracting the disease and surviving it.
Dr Mehmet Oz, the talk show host, has been picked by Trump to run Medicare and Medicaid, the limited state-funded health provision. During the first Trump administration, Oz wanted the state to give emergency authorisation for the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid symptoms, despite it having no evidence base and carrying other risks to patients.
No wonder scientists are worried.
“If the worst case scenario happens and we have a serious public health crisis, the body count is going to be enormous because these guys don’t have the skills or the will to do anything about it,” said John P Moore, a virologist and professor at Cornell University.
But the problem is greater than even those Trump has appointed to top health positions. He has also unleashed a far right street and militia-based movement that sees public health protections as an assault on “freedom”.
To varying degrees, the far right phenomenon can now be seen in most countries. That means if there were reports of human to human transmission of H5N1, the state would find it much harder to implement even the inadequate measures it used at the height of Covid.
Any government urging a lockdown to stem infections would now face a politically organised resistance that thrives on appearing to stand up to authorities.
And it’s not only on the street that the right would make a challenge. Imagine if, rather than organising the distribution of vaccines, the health secretary appeared on TV every night to tell you that they weren’t safe.
The number of people refusing to be jabbed could be so high as to render even an effective vaccine unable to defeat a pandemic. The right’s opposition to public healthcare shows that it is happy to sacrifice people’s lives, so long as that can serve its political needs.
The liberal wings of the political establishment would like us to think that it is only the far right that is putting humanity in danger.
But most politicians now say that lockdowns and furlough schemes were a “mistake”, and a policy that went “too far”. They couch their arguments with examples of rising mental distress since the pandemic. But it is not suffering that motivates them, it’s the need to protect the economy.
They know that pandemic preparations involve huge costs. And they know that the capitalist class will not tolerate another period of disruptive lockdowns.
That’s why public health experts argue that under Joe Biden’s Democrats, the US is making the same mistakes with the H5N1 virus as it did with Covid. A lack of testing means the state does not have a full understanding of how the virus is moving between cow herds.
Biden won’t take on the spread of bird flu for a simple reason—giant farms are a key reason why viruses spread and mutate, and why we are stalked by the danger of pandemics.
Gregg Gonsalves, associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health has said we are “closing our eyes” to both Covid and a potential bird flu pandemic on the horizon. This closing of eyes has a purpose. During the pandemic, the priorities of our system became painfully clear to millions of people.
Many now believe the only way to keep people safe is to take the running of health measures out of politicians’ hands. Neither Biden nor Starmer want us to dwell on that. Free market politicians will not offer the investment we need to defend humanity, but the kind of measures required are already obvious.
First, there needs to be a massive improvement in public health provision and a fight to reduce health inequality. Covid killed relatively more poor people because their jobs were riskier and their housing cramped and inadequate and they were more likely to suffer with long term health conditions.
Someone with badly controlled diabetes, for example, is far less likely to survive Covid than someone who manages their blood sugar well. In the US a single insulin vial costs £90, well beyond what many people can afford.
Second, there needs to be investment in research. Scientists already have strong ideas of which viruses could cause an outbreak. But pharmaceutical giants don’t want to invest in developing drugs for an outbreak that may or may not happen. The state should step in and organise the research.
Third, we know how to conduct mass wastewater surveillance to see what diseases are spreading and where. The obstacle to doing so, again, is cost.
Last, there needs to be cooperation between scientists, health officials and health workers across the globe. That would mean breaking up the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries and placing them under democratic control.
The starting point for pandemic preparation is to acknowledge that capitalism is not only responsible for creating deadly pathogens, but it’s also utterly incapable of protecting us.
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