By Daniel Tarade

Based on remarks given during the Socialist Action Canada webcast entitled “Will the Pandemic Ever End?”

Just like a fire needs fuel, oxygen, and heat, a pandemic requires a virus, susceptible people, and contact between the two. And just like how we cannot separate wildfires in California, Australia, or the Amazon from human-made climate change, the organization of our society impacts on all conditions required for the outbreak of new and deadly viruses. Pandemics are not simply a natural process. We need to address how the profit motive brings about zoonotic viruses. The answer to this question, and others like it, cuts to the heart of the contradictions innate within capitalism.

The narrative built around infectious agents is that they are natural. And that is obviously the case. But it is not simply a case of our scientists, our medicine, and our vaccines against their viruses, bacteria, and parasites. Because even though viruses are natural, they come from somewhere. All viruses that infect humans descend from a virus that didn’t. This is true because viruses predate multicellular organisms. And 70% of contagions jump directly from animals to humans (i.e. zoonotic).[i] When we look at the phylogeography of viruses, we reveal the ways our capitalist society constructs and destroys our environments, often in a way that creates the most perfect incubators for pandemic viruses and superbugs. So questions of political economy are as essential as any biological questions scientists may ask.

There are classical examples like workers being forced into slums during industrialization, which spread tuberculosis like wildfire among the malnourished. Remember that until the early 1900s, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in industrialized nations.[ii] Then there are examples like the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918, where the virus hitched a ride with American troops deployed to fight in an imperial war. As deaths from influenza surpassed those from fighting, censored media outlets could not report on the pandemic for fear that it would hurt the war effort. Spanish news did report on the outbreak as they were neutral in the conflict, hence the Spanish Influenza moniker. Meanwhile, pleas from scientists and doctors stateside couldn’t stop cities like Philadelphia from holding war-bonds parades, which resulted in thousands of deaths.

In addition to imperial and corporate pressures that force people into contact, for-profit interests also create the breeding grounds from which new and deadly viruses emerge.

One recent example is the pandemic of H1N1 swine flu in 2009. Evolutionary biologist and marxist Rob Wallace argues that this strain ought to be called the NAFTA flu as it most likely originated on pig farm owned by the Smithfield corporation near the epicentre in Vera Cruz, Mexico.[iii] Traveling back in time, we find that the American-owned Smithfield began consolidating farms in Mexico in 1994, the year NAFTA went into effect. Like all free-trade agreements, NAFTA allows capital to cross borders with impunity while people fleeing violence and austerity cannot. Case in point, Smithfield set up shop in Mexico because environmental regulations were lax or non-existent compared to those they were routinely breaking in America.

Although we can geographically link the 2009 pandemic to Smithfield, a for-profit corporation, it is the genetics of this virus that indicts the whole capitalist system. 

The 2009 pandemic strain resulted from the mixing and matching of five different influenza strains, including those endemic to north American avian, north American swine, Eurasian swine, and human. When an animal is infected by two different strains of influenza, genetic components can be swapped around. Most of the time, the new hybrid virus is junk, an evolutionary dead end. But every once in a while, a highly virulent, highly pathogenic strain can emerge.  

And there is evidence that process is accelerating. Until 1998, the H1N1 strain that circulated in North American swine was stable. Since that year, new virulent forms appear almost annually on pig firms across North America. Is there a structural reason for this? Or is it simply nature?

Rob Wallace argues that vertically-integrated stockbreeding, originating in 70’s America and since adopted as an industry standard, is an existential threat. This system cramps thousands of monoculture swine and avian into lots and pens, sometimes together, and ships them all around the world. Corporations predominantly take advantage of countries in the ‘global south,’ where labour is cheaper, regulations lax, and the terms of International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans weaken animal and health infrastructure, as has happened in Mexico since the 80s. 

Although the 2009 pandemic turned out to be less deadly than health officials feared in that it only killed hundreds of thousands of people, the subservience of agricultural practices to corporate greed threatens us repeatedly.[iv]  

There is H5N1 avian flu, which first jumped to humans in Hong Kong in 1997.[v] Of 861 confirmed cases in humans between 2003 and 2020, 455 people died.

There is the Nipah virus, first identified in 1998, which can spread to humans via bat or pig.[vi] Although there have been fewer than 1000 confirmed cases in humans, the case mortality rate is approximately 60%.[vii] Fun fact, the movie Contagion was based on this virus gaining the ability to spread between humans easily.

And there is the coronavirus that causes Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome or MERS. First reported in 2012, it spreads to humans primarily from camels.[viii] Of 2500 confirmed cases in humans to date, the case mortality rate hovers around 35%. 

The process of viruses jumping from animal hosts to humans is accelerating and while an infinitesimally small number of capitalists profit from this process, the costs are externalized to the working class. For every pandemic, our governments provide billions in de facto subsidies by paying for vaccines, medicines, and reimbursements for the culling of livestock. These subsidies result in new waves of austerity and public sector cuts. But even more so, it is our lives upended, our bodies in the ground.

So finally onto COVID-19.

Based on genetic analysis, SARS-CoV-2 most most likely originated from bat, as its genetic material is nearly identical to a coronavirus isolated from horseshoe bats in Yunnan province.[ix] From bat, it may have taken many routes to human, but one hypothesis focuses on wet markets in Wuhan, where live exotic animals are cramped in cages. Health officials and scientists scrutinized such wet markets afters the SARS outbreak of 2003, when civets, raccoon dogs, and workers in wet markers were found to carry SARS-CoV.[x] In the wake of SARS, China banned the trade of wildlife, but this proved temporary.

Even if we concede that our for-profit agribusiness foster the ideal conditions for pandemic strains of viruses to emerge, some might imagine the solution is a greater investment in surveillance, technology, medicine, and vaccines. After all, Pfizer just announced that its vaccine is 90% effective. Never mind the unusual situation of announcing preliminary results of a clinical trial still in progress and the Pfizer CEO selling over $5 million in stock the day news broke. Even if the final clinical trial results shows the vaccine is safe and successful at preventing infection, agribusiness in threatening us with a twist ending. (EDIT: The Pfizer clinical trial finished with a final efficacy of 95% and no safety concerns. Moderna obtained similar results with their version of an RNA-based vaccine).

Denmark is the largest mink fur producer in the world. 20% of mink farms have had COVID-19 outbreaks — in the mink. Hundreds of people have contracted COVID-19 from mink, but most worrying are the twelve comprising cluster 5. Here, scientists observed a mutation in the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 not seen in viruses isolated from humans. This is the main target of vaccines as the spike protein is found on the outside of the virus, and preliminary results suggest that antibodies from COVID-19 survivors are less effective at neutralizing this strain of SARS-CoV-2. The only evidence we need to ascertain the graveness of this risk is the Danish government’s order to cull all mink in the country — all 17 million. Only time will tell if this action came in time.

It is clear that we are rapidly approaching a situation where the system cannot keep up anymore. The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services released a report earlier this year highlighting that five new diseases emerge in people every year! They estimate that 1.7 million viruses remain undiscovered in avian and mammalian hosts and that one-third to one-half carry the potential to infect humans.

Not unlike the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, a bleak prognosis hangs in the air. But these bureaucratic institutions cannot provide a vision for system change when they are imbedded in the system. The solutions that emerge from neoliberal governments will only address some of the symptoms of a system in crisis and disproportionately benefit wealthy populations while the rest of us suffer the consequences, whatever they may be.

This is not just a problem that requires a simple bandaid. The connection between agribusiness and pandemics betrays an inherent contradiction in capitalism, much like the connection between big oil and climate change. Vertically-integrated, globalized industrial farms are the inevitable conclusion of competition among for-profit corporations. Integration, scaling up, and outsourcing to the global south are measures corporations need to take to combat the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Capitalism inevitably leads to the destruction of the environment and exploitation of people and animals because it requires perpetual growth.

We can fight for reforms but we must not settle for reforms. Simply pleading with the capitalists to play nice will not work. They might retreat if pressured, but they come back with a vengeance and a whole new cycle of austerity, deregulation, exploitation, and fascism. We must lop off the head of capital once and for all. Only a working class movement led by a vanguard party can plan a rational economy based on human need rather than corporate greed. We must unite because an infection in one is a risk to all!

[i] Jones, K. E., Patel, N. G., Levy, M. A., Storeygard, A., Balk, D., Gittleman, J. L., & Daszak, P. (2008). Global trends in emerging infectious diseases. Nature, 451(7181), 990-993.

[ii] van Helden, P. D. (2003). The economic divide and tuberculosis: Tuberculosis is not just a medical problem, but also a problem of social inequality and poverty. EMBO reports, 4(S1), S24-S28.

[iii] Wallace, R. (2016). Big farms make big flu: dispatches on influenza, agribusiness, and the nature of science. NYU Press. Highly, highly recommend this collection of essays!

[iv] Dawood, F.S., Iuliano, A.D., Reed, C., Meltzer, M.I., Shay, D.K., Cheng, P.Y., Bandaranayake, D., Breiman, R.F., Brooks, W.A., Buchy, P. & Feikin, D.R. (2012). Estimated global mortality associated with the first 12 months of 2009 pandemic influenza A H1N1 virus circulation: a modelling study. The Lancet infectious diseases, 12(9), 687-695.

[v] Chan, P. K. (2002). Outbreak of avian influenza A (H5N1) virus infection in Hong Kong in 1997. Clinical Infectious Diseases, 34(Supplement_2), S58-S64.

[vi] Chua, K.B., Bellini, W.J., Rota, P.A., Harcourt, B.H., Tamin, A., Lam, S.K., Ksiazek, T.G., Rollin, P.E., Zaki, S.R., Shieh, W.J. and Goldsmith, C.S. (2000). Nipah virus: a recently emergent deadly paramyxovirus. Science, 288(5470), 1432-1435.

[vii] Kenmoe, S., Demanou, M., Bigna, J.J., Kengne, C.N., Modiyinji, A.F., Simo, F.B.N., Eyangoh, S., Sadeuh-Mba, S.A. and Njouom, R. (2019). Case fatality rate and risk factors for Nipah virus encephalitis: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Virology, 117, 19-26.

[viii] Zaki, A. M., Van Boheemen, S., Bestebroer, T. M., Osterhaus, A. D., & Fouchier, R. A. (2012). Isolation of a novel coronavirus from a man with pneumonia in Saudi Arabia. New England Journal of Medicine, 367(19), 1814-1820.

[ix] Zhang, Y. Z., & Holmes, E. C. (2020). A genomic perspective on the origin and emergence of SARS-CoV-2. Cell.

[x] Webster, R. G. (2004). Wet markets—a continuing source of severe acute respiratory syndrome and influenza?. The Lancet, 363(9404), 234-236.