The Fault in Our SARS | Rob Wallace (pt. 2)
The weight of COVID origin stories and the outbreaks on the horizon
In part two of my interview with evolutionary epidemiologist and author Rob Wallace, we continue our discussion of his new collection, The Fault in Our SARS: COVID-19 in the Biden Era, published through Monthly Review.
Entering year four of the pandemic, Rob Wallace has diligently, and extensively, written two books worth of essays on the various facets of the SARS-2 outbreak, many of which are examined in this interview. I ask Wallace to lay out the complex reality and geopolitical implications of the various hypotheses of the novel coronavirus’s origins. Each strain of these origin stories of the pandemic carries a certain weight, and deserves a fair hearing, which Wallace does deftly and carefully. And finally, with the specter of more zoonotic spillover events in the near and distant future, I ask him: What does the abandonment of the population to the SARS-2 virus portend for other spillover events on the horizon?
This interview was recorded Feb 28, 2023, and released as episode 341 of Last Born In The Wilderness. The transcript that follows is the second half of our conversation, and was edited mostly for clarity, and somewhat for length. Read part one here.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH
There are many layers to this, but I want to discuss two essays in The Fault in Our SARS that explore the origins of COVID-19. I know there's more than just two hypotheses, but they generally fit into two camps: first is the field hypothesis, which posits a zoonotic virus spilled over into human populations, and then became contagious among human beings—this is the most generally accepted theory; and the second is the lab leak hypothesis, which is the idea that a virology lab in Wuhan, China had a hot agent, SARS-CoV-2, and it somehow, whether purposefully or not, got into a human being and spilled out into the population.
It's all well and good to be curious about where the virus came from. Certainly, it's of concern we have virology labs around the world that may have these types of accidents. It's similar to nuclear waste, with all the numerous facilities storing nuclear waste we need to keep track of. But, it's not just about whether it came from a lab or not, it also has numerous geopolitical implications.
On one level, when you mentioned earlier that China lifted its “Zero COVID” policies—the same US publications were saying, "China's crazy, what are they doing? This is awful, it's authoritarian and tyranny," and then as soon as they lift pandemic restrictions, they respond, "Oh, shit—China's has the largest population in the world, and now all of a sudden, everyone can get infected, and who knows what the implications are for the rest of us." This sort of cognitive dissonance is interesting to see play out.
But, regarding China specifically, now we're seeing all these reports that the lab leak is really what happened. In The Fault in Our SARS, you go through the scientific literature and the evidence, and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each of these hypotheses. But it's not just about that, there's a brewing Cold War conflict between the US and China, and where this virus originates has geopolitical implications. Could you talk about the nature of this discussion around the origins of the virus?
ROB WALLACE
Yes. So like much of my book, The Fault in Our SARS has some essays that are short and direct to the public, and there are others where I’m trying to think through things and are more scientifically laden. The two essays on the origins of COVID-19 are me trying to make my way through the various hypotheses. As you described, they are more than two. And then the there's a third class of essays in this, where I came to the realization that this was not just about the virus, data, or the struggle over applying our understanding of things, that there was something deeply wrong in the bedrock of our country that led us to a point where it didn't matter what data we were switching back to and sending everybody back to work.
I have a couple essays in there that are quite lengthy, and seem to touch on topics that don't speak to each other. There's one on about police brutality, in an essay called A Spray of Split Seconds: that second in which a cop kills a 13-year-old in a Chicago back alley didn't happen in that second—it's a social moment that extends out to the entirety of our social practice in our mode of socially reproducing ourselves, just as the moment in which someone's infected by COVID-19 isn't just what happened in terms of whether someone masks or was vaccinated. There are broader notions of how we socially reproduce ourselves and decisions we make into leading to that moment–that's the context.
And so, the question you're asking about are two essays that are scientifically laden in many terms—there are many ideas I'm struggling with. I'm debating with other people while writing this, and treating all the hypotheses seriously. It really gives the sense that there's much more going on than merely a lab leak, or “it happened to pass from a bat.” You get a much greater sense of the kind of political economy of research of the various factions, not only from China versus the US, but within the US, and the struggle and nature of how we study this very thing. We have a situation where some protagonists are in the business, ostensibly, to protect us from the next pandemic, but instead are actually engaged with agribusiness and other large companies, taking money and greenwashing them, and then allowing them to continue to cut into the forest that, in essence, increases the spillover rate.
As far as the EcoHealth Alliance, they take money from Colgate Palmolive and from Johnson & Johnson. Their leader, Peter Daszak, has gotten millions of dollars from the federal government to investigate outbreaks. Someone had a wonderfully terrible joke: It's not just that EcoHealth Alliance has stopped zero pandemics, they have actually stopped negative one pandemics. Their involvement in some of the experiments that may have led to a lab leak meant Ecohealth Alliance may have been involved in helping the emergence of SARS-2, and also in terms of protecting these various companies. They're helping drive the emergence of the next pathogen out in the field.
So, let me give you the story here. I'm going to start off with the notion of a lab leak as having conspiratorial connotations, rightfully so—some of them are batshit crazy. You want to stay away from that stuff. And some of it, as we began with, is being used as a geopolitical tool, as you describe, to punish China—China's bad for “Zero COVID”; China’s bad for removing “Zero COVID.” Don't get me wrong–in this book and in previous books, I give China's shit when they deserve it. It's not about running interference for China, they've got their problems and are in the business of the BRICS model development; they've moved millions of people out of poverty, but also destroyed much of their landscape in a way that leads to these spillover events. But I'm not in China. While I can critique and criticize, the Chinese people have to make decisions about what to do with that. I am in here in the US and my focus is on making sure that our ruling class doesn't wreck everything.
Before all this happened, there was considerable critique of the expansion of labs around the world. There's a Princeton University team under Matt Keeling's lab over at Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. A postdoc by the name of Thomas Van Boeckel, who helped write a paper out of there, mapped all the new BSL-3 and BSL-4 biosafety labs that were built since 9/11, when the H5N1 [the Avian Flu] became the first celebrity virus. Thousands of labs were built. And while doing so, they mapped the percent of the population in the world that was subsequently now wired into the commuting field out from underneath each of these BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs. These labs are all in the business of trying to figure out ways to protect us from pathogen outbreaks, but in the course of doing so, a rare event, like a lab leak, bends toward inevitability. So, this isn't some wacko idea.
This is coming not only from Matt Keeling's lab at Princeton, but also Laurie Garrett, who is very well known as a writer on diseases, complaining about all the number of lab accidents that have happened in these labs. There's Alison Galvani of Yale University and Marc Lipsitch of Harvard University, very well-known and prominent epidemiologists and modelers, writing extensively on the danger of this. So, this is why I treated the lab leak with respect, and not the wacko versions. This wasn't a bioweapon or anything.
As far as the lab leak hypotheses go, there are two versions of it, what I call the left-wing and right-wing versions of the lab leak. The right-wing one we've been reading all week. It's the Wall Street Journal version: China is hideous. Wall Street Journal has been banging on this particular possibility since the beginning of COVID. China bad; lab leak; incompetent; hideous. It's part of the new Cold War, but also, it’s really about saying this is a particular accident in a particular time and space. It's not about capitalism, even though you have pathogens emerging everywhere, not just China: Ebola emerged out of increasingly developed Sub Saharan Africa; Zika emerged out of Brazil; the Swine Flu in 2009 emerged out of industrial hog outside Mexico City. We have H5N2 here in 2015, but now H5N1 among in industrial poultry here in the US, and also across Eurasia. We had African Swine Fever that arrived in China in 2018, before COVID emerged. This is a brutal declaration about the nature of our capitalist metabolism and its impact on ecology and epidemiology. But we can't talk about that. If you just blame China, then you can wash your hands of this.
The left-wing version is much more interesting, and it's based on the Bioscience Resource Project. Jonathan Latham, who I've had conversations with about this, and Allison Wilson have a different version of it. First, they discussed the lab leak out of Wuhan Institute of Virology, with the notion that they were conducting gain-of-function studies. “Gain-of-function” means that you have a virus and either engineer it to increase its deadliness to figure it out what this virus might do to us, or you let it evolve on its own to figure out a way to kill the mouse better. In other words, you use natural selection as your industrial tool to do all the hard work to figure out how to be deadlier. Both those things are not good things to do.
Now, we take a step back a couple of years, and we go back to our friends at EcoHealth Alliance, and Peter Datsik. They're not so much about ecology; their notions of ecology are about blaming locals for taking down a stand of trees that might lead to a spillover event. They're involved in what are called absolute geographies—GPS coordinates—where some bad thing ecologically happened. But, they are not interested at all in blaming their grant makers, whether it's the US government, or Colgate Palmolive. They're not interested in talking about relational geographies where capital from one side of the world invests in deforesting and developing the other side of the world that leads to the spillover event. In my view, places like Hong Kong, New York, and London are much more disease hotspots than merely these GPS coordinates because they're putting cash on the barrel to rip down a forest that leads to the spillover event. It's not any indigenous group or smallholder farmers that are doing the worst of the damage.
Ecohealth Alliance decides they're going to do a lot of this gain-of-function work, which is a weird thing to do for an ecology group. But they're backed by millions of dollars from federal agencies, including the Department of Defense. So, they hooked up at the University of North Carolina with the Vineet Menachery, a molecular biologist, and they started doing gain-of-function studies with SARS. Then in 2014, the Obama administration put a moratorium on things: "You can't do these kinds of studies." They're absolutely insane to do because of the danger of a lab leak. Can you imagine a weaponized SARS escaping Chapel Hill into the local community? You don't want to do those things. This is precisely what Matt Keeling's group warned about with their maps of all the BSL-3 and 4 labs being built.
So, despite the moratorium, it's my understanding that NIH [National Institutes of Health] gave them approval because it's not just the University of North Carolina there. They also have Zhengli Shi, who is known as “the bat lady,” who does a lot of work on SARS stuff for the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And this is all in the open literature there—you can look up the papers, and you can see who's listed in them. But I think what happens when Obama puts in the moratorium—which Trump basically strips back in 2017—I think NIH approves Ecohealth Alliance to take their money to do those kinds of experiments in Wuhan who had an institute for virology. In other words, there's a convergence of opportunity and intent.
This is why the lab leak idea deserves a serious examination. I'm not a proponent of the lab leak hypothesis, I believe in the field hypotheses, but what I'm getting it is the kind of seriousness by which this kind of thing should be unpacked. Jonathan Latham at the Bioscience Research Project first thought that it was a gain-of-function virus that left the back door at Wuhan and ended up at the food market in Wuhan. But subsequently, they changed their mind about it, and decided on a second version of this, the Mojiang mine version of the lab leak.
What happened was six miners in Mojiang and Yunnan–which is a southwestern province in China, far from Wuhan–go into a cave there to mine bat guano, to use it as fuel or something else. All six get sick, and three of them die. Latham has a master's thesis translated from Chinese describing their infection. And although other groups subsequently deny this, from my reading of the English translation, it certainly sounds like a COVID. But at the time, it wasn't decided or diagnosed as that. Zhengli Shi, from Wuhan Institute of Virology, and their team goes down and does all sorts of sampling there. There are the six samples from the patients who got sick with some SARS-like thing, and the samples that the group took from that cave and around Yunnan, and brought it back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which subsequently opened into a BSL-4 lab in 2015 [with visits from US science diplomats in 2018]. So, his hypothesis is that it then leaks out of the backdoor from that way, and isn't from the Ecohealth Alliance stuff–it's from the cave instead.
In my book, I go into explaining all the problems with this hypothesis, or the things that I disagree with, and the science that is opposed to it. Again, I agree more with the hypothesis of field emergence, but those who are opposed to the lab leak hypothesis in the US are not good people, either. They don't have their shit together at all. There's Kristian Andersen, an evolutionary genomics guy out of California, who wrote a paper in early 2020, basically saying, "It's definitely not a lab leak.” Why? “Because SARS-2 is different from SARS-1. If anyone wanted to engineer this thing, they would make it look exactly like SARS-1," which makes no sense at all. It's like total baby talk, no one would agree with that. Anyone who knew of gain-of-function would understand a way you can get a virulent SARS just by serial passage, and you don't need to engineer it in your lab–the virus will figure it out. And you can end up with a new way of producing dangerous SARS by not having to make it look like exactly like SARS-1. There are plenty of versions of SARS: MERS is out there, a Middle East version of it, and evolved its own version of being a deadly coronavirus. It didn't have to act exactly like SARS. But Anderson is, as I described in the book, really in cahoots with Fauci to work through ways in which to eliminate the notion that lab leak is possible. So, I'm in total favor of the field hypothesis, but I do not in any way line up with those who favor the field hypothesis here in the US, mostly because they were at the time trying to wash their hands of the notion that a lab leak was at all possible, which is complete BS.
I appreciate your patience on this because the story here is not told at all, almost in any way. When you read the Wall Street Journal, you would have no idea of all the background that leads to the conflict, subtleties, clashes, or the landscape in which all these hypotheses are presently jockeying.
Another one of the versions of the field hypothesis puts the origins of the virus in the Wuhan market, not too far from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but also taking in all sorts of animals that have been historically shown to carry COVID. There was another team there in November 2019 and took photos of the market along with three other markets, and they found things like raccoon dog, hog badger, Chinese hair, and red fox being sold there. This is against Latham and Wilson, who declared that the market couldn't possibly be the source because Wuhan didn't have southern cuisine—this is precisely what was being sold at the Wuhan market: animals historically from the south and part of Southern cuisine. And I think Huanan actually reads as “Southern foods.”
So, there's Michael Worobey's group, and Worobey has had a lot of fame for helping figure out the origins of HIV in southeastern Cameroon. It's really remarkable stuff. But I don't necessarily agree with everything Worobey says about the Wuhan market, but they do a couple of studies that are very interesting. One is an evolutionary study and the other is a geospatial statistical analysis of the Wuhan market. The evolutionary study shows there were two different strains of SARS circulating in the Wuhan market, and these are from environmental samples that are found largely in the side of the market that does live animal selling. Those two strains emerged out of an animal and a human, and what's remarkable about them is it really gives the implication that at that point, SARS-2 had evolved to a point that it was radioactive—different strains emerging at the same point, in this case, in the market. The geospatial analysis shows that largely, again, it was in that section in which they were selling the animals. And then in the early days, in January and February 2020, you had spillover into the local community, and it wasn't just elderly people getting it. They were able to identify that, and then after that, that kind of geographical signal is lost, and both strains–A and B–subsequently spread out through the rest of China. In this case, I talked about opportunity and intent from the virus vantage point. There is data showing the virus evolved there and data showing spatially that, in all likelihood, it originated out of the market itself. There's no signal that it came from anywhere near the Wuhan neighborhood.
At the same time, there's George Gao's group–the Chinese group. George Gao has done remarkable work, but I think he's under considerable pressure. He basically says it started in the market, but humans brought it in. It just happens to be the market was a nexus of people gathering together. I'm not on that side of things. Reading Michael Worobey's work, I'm increasingly convinced that it did spread and emerge there. Partly, he's trying to nail it all down by saying it came from an animal, and George Gao was trying to say it arrived at the market and came by human, but doesn't want to say it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So, he's in a bind. He wants to say it's brought in by humans, but doesn't want to say it came over from the lab. He does want to say things—and you hear Zhengli Shi also say this, almost like it's clearly coming from the government—along the lines that SARS-2 originated from outside China, and it came in through frozen foods or stuff like that. It's my view that's complete bullshit. They're just trying to wash their hands of it.
This is where I brought in both the lab leak stuff and the Wuhan market is basically organized in a kind of forensic model of things, like Law and Order. We want to nail down what actual animal infected what human, and missing the entire point. Instead, If we follow Worobey’s notion that, in essence, there are already multiple strains circulating in the market, and saying the virus arrived from out of town already on its way to going human to human, [it illustrates a different picture].
And in fact, the many scientists involved in evolutionary genomics are the unspoken heroes in my view: Shu-Miaw Chaw, Maciej Boni, Konstantinos Voskarides, and Spyros Lytras— names that nobody has heard of, who actually went into the evolutionary genetics, took the genetic sequences of all the samples that they were able to find in bats and humans, and were able to reconstruct how the virus has been spreading over the course of time. There are very long lengths of time between what were considered the closest related bat specimens and actual SARS-2. They were evolving from each other decades ago, and are seeing spillover events and recombination between different strains happening over the course of thousands of miles across South and Central China. They're hypothesizing some versions of SARS-2 were circulating in humans years before, and have a much grander view of how this happened. It didn't just show up in this animal at Wuhan, although that spillover event may have happened.
If you want to discuss causality, you have to speak about: What are the supply lines that led to wild foods being turned into the largest market in Wuhan, alongside more traditional livestock? How did wild foods become as capitalized, or much more of an official source of food, as livestock were? You get into the history of Chinese food and into the lengths of commodity chains, how on the other end of production, where industrial livestock competes with the wild food industry to cut into the forest to find either animals directly or land in which to grow these animals, and you get into a much wider field of causality that moves us away from the Law and Order forensics to broader notions of how diseases emerge. And some scientists have gotten to this point.
Roger Frutos is someone who's been basically writing on some of this, although he doesn't mention circuits of capital the way our team does, or about the socio-metabolic imprint upon landscapes of capitalist development, but at least he's getting the picture that it's not about what specific animal at what specific time. The lab leak and that kind of Wuhan market hypothesis are in some ways much more related to each other than this notion of looking at the broader landscape of development as it relates to circuits of capital because they are both about washing the hands of an economic system that causes the damage. We build these labs to clean up the mess of the pathogens that emerge from our production!
Then, at the same time, if you focus on smallholders and indigenous people, like Ecohealth Alliance does, you can blame them for it, even though it's the people giving them money that is driving the deforestation and development on a global level. If you just look at the Wuhan market, it's only focused on the question that maybe is not as important as: How do we arrive at a place where wild food is industrialized? How did we arrive at a place in which the chains of commerce are linking the deepest forests, where bats, birds, and other animals have long been reservoirs for these pathogens, developing and connecting them to local provincial capitals, and these marginalized pathogens getting on the global travel and trade network from Wuhan to Miami Beach in a matter of days? That's the question. That's the issue.
By not focusing on these questions, it allows everybody to wash their hands of having to talk about how our present model of economic development and social reproduction is the source of the pathogen, and that the causalities are not just in the object of the virus or the host, but in the field of relationships felt by humans and nonhumans from one part of the world to the other.
FARNSWORTH
Thank you for going over that. There are so many complex details, but nonetheless, explaining it in that way really helps clarify many different aspects of this.
I wanted to reference someone that I interviewed some months ago, Boyce Upholt, a great journalist and freelance writer who wrote a piece for the New Republic about Avian Flu [H5N1], describing biosecurity and the nature of these poultry farms across the US. There are so many different layers to peel back here, and I want to make a few different references.
Online, I remember you wrote you've been badgered by plenty of people: "Can you please talk about all this attention that's now being given to Avian Flu?" It's been written about quite a bit, the overwhelming concern that we could have a horrible, infectious, and deadly Avian Flu spill over into human beings and have something on par with the 1918 influenza pandemic, which likely originated from a chicken farm in Kansas.
To get to the point here, I feel the SARS-2 virus is just at this threshold where once the billionaires and the political elite recognized they could insulate themselves from the effects on an individual level, while also making enormous profits off the conditions set by it, they then stopped giving a shit about it. The precautionary principle is out the window—who gives a shit the workers are getting it, they're just healthy enough that they can go back to work. Yes, we're in more crisis laden times, but nonetheless, we're fine. Class interests are being met.
With something like a bird flu, it's on a level where the casualties will be higher if spillover were to occur. There's an interesting dynamic playing out, and I just want to get your thoughts on this because it's not even just about Avian Flu. It's about how we have set up the conditions for when something worse comes along, potentially happening concurrently with what's happening right now, there's not going to really be an appetite or interest in really dealing with it because then we’d have to admit that the measures we took at the beginning of the SARS-2 pandemic were actually good and should be used not just for this pandemic, but for other epidemics or pandemics as well. It's this interesting place that I feel like we've come to where we're accepting, almost, the inevitability of something worse coming along, but not willing to actually engage in proactive measures to even prevent it from occurring because it would admit that we fucked up on this particular issue.
Do you have any thoughts about this contradictory sort of attitude that we're seemingly living in right now? I say "we," but particularly those that are supposed to be managing the economy and the State.
WALLACE
It's a great question. If you see me laughing, it's out of utter despair, one must laugh to keep from crying because I think you explained it very well, as far as the state of things: the contradictory, the clusterfuck.
It’s at a point presently where I, along with the People's CDC and others that think COVID is a problem, are pointed at as the problem because we overreacted to COVID, and therefore reduced children’s development by not having them go to school, and so on—never mind the 1.1 million dead and all the people sick with Long COVID. It's been so twisted around that those of us who are arguing along the lines that these protections actually can help people and might help us prepare to help people once again [are seen as the problem]. The damage here is such that, as I described earlier, not only has public health as a practice been absolutely gutted in terms of our practicing it and funding it, but also as a very concept.
This whole thing that we might go about preparing for what is, in all likelihood, additional outbreaks—I'm not saying that people should be locked down in preparation of that at all, it just happens to be that we have a BSL-3 virus circulating, and we might learn a few things along the way to protect ourselves. You're supposed to come out of the pandemic with a greater appreciation of public health to allow you to be prepared for what comes next. And instead, we have the opposite. We have all those who basically champion the notion that public health isn't a real thing, including public health practitioners, who are very much integrated with connection to power. We are, in essence, worse off than we were, instead of better off. You're supposed to learn shit, and we not at the moment.
In The Fault in Our SARS, I wrote a piece called Puzzled Patients, about what's a black fungus that emerged and infected patients in India with COVID-19. Other pathogens are co-circulating, and oftentimes will act in cahoots at the molecular level. It's called reciprocal activation: one virus's proteins will set off the proteins of the other virus, and they both do much better than the under the conditions. But it also is found at the epidemiological and ecological level—HIV and Kaposi's sarcoma, a herpes virus, is a good example. HIV and all those opportunistic infections did very well by each other, and spread a lot more. Of course, COVID, just being out and about, and not taking care of business, leads to additional deaths by virtue of people not being able to go to the hospital.
But in addition, there were hypotheses that African Swine Fever that emerged and eventually ended up in China in 2017-2018 may have been, in part, a socio-ecological cause of the emergence of COVID. Because with African Swine Fever, the domestic market for hogs collapsed, which may have led to more incursion into local forests to get wild animals to cover for the loss in protein. I doubt that's true, but the point is important: different pathogens are interacting with each other at multiple levels. The complexity of the combinations of interactions is getting beyond even the experts' capacity to grasp the nature of it all.
Your point of it emerging in parallel is it's a critical one. I would say that my Facebook post was pushing back on the kind of trainspotting among the disease folk of going for the next new thing. COVID is still circulating and has killed 15 million: Can you pay attention to what's going on now? It’s the notion of getting a serotonin hit over the next virus that might kill a billion people. I'm not saying that I haven't done that before myself, but I came to the realization that it is also a way of distracting us from the ongoing outbreak that's happening now.
H5N1/H5NX has been circulating as a dangerous thing for a long time. Not just the original H5N1, the original gangster from 1997. We're talking about this particular H5 index emerging in 2014-2015, circulating through Eurasia and coming to America—we had an outbreak in 2015, and again in 2021-2022, killing millions of birds here. The worry, of course, is that you have some seals getting infected. It’s implied some mammal to mammal transmission—minks have been infected that way. There are multiple examples of that in the last few years. I'm not saying that it isn't creeping in that direction. I'm just saying the sudden interest in it over the fact that there's some of us have been talking about this for more than two decades that this was likely to happen is two things.
The first is, to be fair, we were writing about this for some time, and then you choose to be upset about it now, even though it was as dangerous at that time as it is to us now. The second is I have to catch myself. If we remember my first essay on COVID in February 2020, I wrote about how exhausted I am already, in part because there's so much of this leading to this moment and nothing was done to intervene, even at that point. There might be another version of that going on right now. I got three years squeezed out of me on COVID for now, and the notion of having to worry about H5N1 at this point is exhausting to thinking about.
But also, it’s getting sucked into the excitement of the new emergence and never really thinking through what COVID has been teaching us–a masterclass that has given us a much better intuitive understanding of the nature of pathogens and what they can do, not only to our individual bodies, but to our societies. We've utterly failed in terms of our response, but we do have a more visceral understanding of those things. To not have learned the lessons enough to prepare for the next one is utterly ludicrous. And yet, this is where we're at, where those of us, as you brought up earlier, are being gaslighted and shamed for an overreaction, if you call 15 million people dead or more an overreaction.
And you're right, if you go from 2% mortality rate to 25-30%, it's a whole new game. Why would the rich be okay with this? We talked about this the first time I appeared on your show, discussing the cycles of accumulation: Coming out of World War II, we continued up on our cycle of accumulation, as the Marxists and world systems theorists talk about it, where you start off turning money into capital and building imperial infrastructure from that. And when things start to fall apart, the rich bail and turn capital into money: "We're not in the business of building things."
Didn't the Ohio train derailment tell us anything about the fact we're not building rail anymore, or building in protections? Rail is just another means by which to strip assets. Wall Street owns much of that rail company [Norfolk Southern] and many of the others. And so, it comes to fracking: you poison your own waterways to get a few puffs of natural gas. They're in the business of stripping out what was built into that infrastructure. Whether it's a physical or social representation of the public commons that came out of building Empire, which sucks for all involved, but contained this notion of public health, a railway system, and somewhat clean waterways. Now we are on the other side of that: the rich fatten themselves up, bailing out and turning capital into money.
Whether it's conscious or not, there is a grim certainty about the way they're acting that seems so structural and representative of all the other cashing out that happened historically, whether it’s the Italian city states, Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and then the US–those empires rose and fell with many of the same dynamics. There was talk about whether China would replace us on that, but we may not have the ecology to support another round of capitalism.
Vijay Prashad appeared at my book launch, and his point is that he's stunned by the utter mediocrity of our ruling class here. At the same time, their impulse of bailing and cashing out is structural, but also, it feels like our political class is dumber these days. Not to put anybody Lyndon Johnson or anybody else on a pedestal, but there's an aspect that they knew how to run Empire. We've gotten to the point where the hideous Henry Kissinger asks, "What the fuck are we doing starting a war with China and Russia?" He can't get his mind wrapped around that, and that guy has a lot to answer for.
It's a terrible historical moment. I don't like to end in notions of hope because it is often used as a placeholder to deal with the damage that we're feeling from what's going on. However, I do believe in what's called active optimism. I think there are plenty of amazing things that are happening. People are coming to realizations—I think the anger at the Ohio derailment really speaks volumes. For the agroecologists around the world, from both the Global North and Global South, we’re seeing the decision to consciously move in the direction of turning agriculture back toward a natural economy and better integrating with the local landscapes, more in the cooperative direction of people getting together and working together with each other. You see it here, even in the Midwest. Conservative farmers are coming to conclusions that a more of regenerative agriculture is necessary, with some of them doing the more minimal version of just healthy soils. God bless them. If they want to do healthy soils and less runoff, that's fantastic. In fact, there were some of the counties that our group was studying, like one in Wisconsin, in what we considered a more conventional and conservative county, before we even got there—we had nothing to do with this—the dairy farmers were working with the healthy rivers folk to try to have less runoff. We had nothing to do with that. This is a destitute, Senator Scott Walker supporter county, but they were figuring out stuff to move in a direction to do this. And that's a beautiful thing, it really speaks to the possibility that we can avoid Civil War–all this shit in the newspapers about Democrat versus Republican or city versus rural.
There are means and mechanisms by which we can find our way. I will never work with fascists, that's not going to happen—we all have our lines in the sand with this stuff—but to be able to work with people who understand enough that industrializing agricultural production was a hideous, horrible thing. And if we can somehow move in a direction that not only is involved with healthy soils, but also with farmer autonomy and community control of supply lines, then we're cooking. If the US, which was basically served as a horrible model of industrial production for the rest of the world, can somehow make a turn in the direction of a healthier agroecology, that, by virtue of its agrobiodiversity by having all sorts of different animals across the landscape or on farm, will help control and stop the emergence of these deadly pathogens. If you have a diverse landscape of livestock and poultry, something like Avian Influenza is unlikely to be able to pick up the speed necessary to be as deadly as it is now.
FARNSWORTH
I think everything in this discussion is dire and difficult to process. It's one thing to intellectualize it and look at it on a scientific level, certainly, but the emotional weight of it is real. But there is work happening that is, as you described, not about political ideology as much as it is just looking at the landscape and realizing this isn't right, let's do something and move in a different direction. People are figuring out the means to do that.
I really appreciate you ending on that note and for taking time to go over all this information.
WALLACE
Thank you very much. I appreciate the invitation here to be able to talk about these things. This is the first time I've actually gone through all the different possibilities in terms of the origins of COVID-19, and I appreciate your patience going through that.
Like the book overall, I think you'll draw meaning and frankly, I think you’ll be a different person on the other side of reading the book, so thanks for inviting me.
Rob Wallace is an agroecologist, economic geographer and evolutionary epidemiologist at the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps in St Paul. He is the author of Big Farms Make Big Flu; Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19; and The Fault in Our SARS: COVID-19 in the Biden Era. He has consulted for the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.