"This new age of plagues, like previous pandemic epochs, is directly the result of economic globalization. . . . Today, multinational capitalization has been the driver of disease evolution through the burning or logging out of tropical forests, the proliferation of factory farming, the explosive growth of slums and concomitantly of 'informal employment,' and the failure of the pharmaceutical industry to find profit in mass producing lifeline antivirals, new-generation antibiotics, and universal vaccines.
"Forest destruction, whether by multinationals or desperate subsistence farmers, eliminates the barrier between human populations and the reclusive wild viruses endemic to birds, bats, and mammals. Factory farms and giant feedlots act as human incubators of novel viruses while appalling sanitary conditions in slums produce populations that are both densely packed and immune compromised. The inability of global capitalism to create jobs in the so-called 'developing world' means that a billion or more subsistence workers (the 'informal proletariat') lack an employer link to healthcare or the income to purchase treatment from the private sector, leaving them dependent upon collapsing public hospitals systems, if they even exist. Permanent bio-protection against new plagues, accordingly, would require more than vaccines. It would need the suppression of these 'structures of disease emergence' through revolutionary reforms in agriculture and urban living that no large capitalist or state-capitalist country would ever willingly undertake."
-------Mike Davis, The Monster Enters - Covid 19, The Avian Flu and the Plagues of Capitalism, pps. 16-18
No comments:
Post a Comment