The Global Economy Is A Pandemic Factory

Recurring pandemics have been baked in by an immoral elite

It’s often said a pandemic happens once every one hundred years.

Covid seemed to fit the timeline almost perfectly. The 1918 flu followed by 2019.

Many probably think this means humanity is in the clear for another century.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In an effort to test this 100-year construct, researchers ran 150,000 simulations modelling various pathogens and outbreak scenarios. They found a near 30% chance of another covid-like global outbreak happening not in some distant decade, but before 2033.

A near one-in-three chance that we’ll be living through another event that crushes health systems, kills tens of millions and triggers a collapse of life expectancy within nine years.

The researchers identified the reasons why pandemics now emerge at warp speed: global travel, intensive agriculture, deforestation, climate change. It’s not uncommon to see these factors pinpointed in the mainstream media. People like Bill Gates often blithely mention them. But rarely is the bigger truth noted: these factors do not emerge organically. They are products not accidents of our global economic system, a system designed primarily to satisfy ruling class power and greed.

And this economic system is a pandemic factory.

Let’s run through the charges.

This is an economy that demands the maximum number of people travel between the maximum number of places, optimising opportunities for viral spread. On July 7^th this year, 135,000 commercial flights were recorded globally, making it the busiest day in human history for air travel. Three weeks ago ahead of thanksgiving weekend, almost 3 million people in the US alone got on a plane in one day, making it the busiest ever.

Governments, airlines and airport owners are not content with these numbers. As of 2019 there were 423 new airports under construction.

This is an economy determined to maximise the digging up and burning of ancient buried carbon, heating the planet, creating ideal conditions for pathogens to emerge and explode.

A recent study warned that as the world heats up, mammals are being forced to move, chasing the habitat niches they depend on for survival. As they do this, species that have never encountered each other before are crossing paths, sharing viruses and providing new opportunities for viral evolution and emergence.

Turning up the heat on our planet also threatens to unleash viruses that have been safely encased in the northern permafrost for millennia. Earlier this year scientists successfully infected an amoeba with a virus that had been laying dormant in the ice for tens of thousands of years. In a separate study scientists revived 13 new viruses they had isolated from seven different ancient Siberian permafrost samples. They said each has the capability to infect humans.

Governments and fossil fuel companies are not content with the current pandemic risks created by global warming. There are 520 new oil and gas fields, and 269 expansion projects currently in development.

Seven hundred and eighty-nine in total.

All due to be operating by 2027.

There is no intention to transition away from fossil fuels, whatever the latest climate deal might say.

This is an economy that rewards ever-deeper incursions into untouched nature.

10 million hectares of forest has been chopped down every year since 2010. Obliterating forests for agribusiness brings humans into contact with animals that harbour new viruses and reduces the biodiversity necessary to keep pathogens contained. One study says a 10% increase in Amazon deforestation results in an additional 7.4 million people being infected with malaria, mosquitoes proliferating in an unbalanced ecosystem.

This is an economy that demands animals are mistreated and slaughtered in ever-greater numbers.

70 billion animals are now killed for food every year, the majority raised in intensive conditions. Scientists have long said factory farming of animals raises pandemic risks, with animals crammed together and transported vast distances in huge numbers the perfect breeding ground for viruses.

Farmed animal livestock now accounts for 62% of the world’s mammal biomass and wild animals just 4%.

This is the utter dysregulation of the animal world.

Global travel, intensive agriculture, deforestation, climate change. None of these are bugs of the system. They are essential features of it. Billionaires don’t exist without this destruction. A technological capitalist system therefore guarantees pandemics.

And as elite profit taking is contingent upon not just the maintenance but the continual expansion of this system, the conditions for viral emergence can only ever become more favourable.

More fossil fuels, more extraction, more animal farming, more heat, more flying. More, more, more is the only goal, the singular idea.

If you sat down and purposefully planned a system to maximise pandemics, this is precisely the one you’d design.

And what do we get in exchange?

Pandemics that collapse life expectancy and leave us sicker and weaker.

An economy of extreme inequity in which just EIGHT men own as much wealth as HALF the people on the planet.

A military-industrial complex that demands fresh wars, horror and the blood of civilians to boost its profits.

The breakdown of international governance.

Boiling summers filled with unbearable heat, smoke and fire.

Megafires that kill one billion animals at a time.

An atomised society driving growing numbers of people into worsening mental health.

Technologies that leave us alienated and isolated.

A for-profit food system pumping out ultra-processed food that poisons rather than nourishes.

A food system that increases rather than relieves global hunger.

An environment saturated in toxins that gives every other person on Earth cancer.

Plastics in our unborn babies and in our blood.

An amount of non-human killing almost too massive to quantify or reckon with.

The snuffing out of indigenous cultures amid extractive carnage.

None of this is conjecture or opinion. This is fact. This is what our world has been made into. Yet when did you last hear a politician lay it out like this? When do we ever get the chance to vote for profound, systemic change? Never. We’re supposed to be grateful for the opportunity to swap out one capital owning faction for another.

And with every non-choice we’re given under the guise of enlightened democratic systems, the normalisation of such grotesque conditions deepens.

What will happen when the next pandemic virus strikes?

It has been said that our experience with covid has left us better prepared for the next pandemic.

This is a joke. A cruel joke. Mainly at the expense of the global south.

The west, in its nativistic, neo-colonial fervour to get vaccinated first, deliberately detonated efforts at an equitable global vaccine regime.

In 2020 western nations signed up to Covax, a World Health Organisation initiative to pool vaccines and ensure all nations could access them at the same cost at the same time. So far so good. But as vaccine development advanced, rich countries reneged on Covax and privately pre-purchased billions of dollars worth of vaccines. They then created what researchers described as a ‘custom, public-private global vaccine acquisition and distribution mechanism’ which hoarded vaccines for the north and released vaccines for poorer countries only when they had excess stock.

The result? People in the west were receiving their third or fourth covid vaccine before hundreds of millions of people had even received one.

A disgraceful example of pure immorality.

Given that omicron likely emerged in an unvaccinated immunosuppressed person in South Africa, this immorality and greed helped lead to where we are today: a virus mutating and infecting people like no other on Earth.

And next time? Are western elites suddenly going to develop a moral conscience and reckon with their mistakes? When have they ever done this? They don’t see them as mistakes.

The next pandemic virus will take hold among populations weakened by the last virus, while political and social conditions sculpted by ideas of covid over-reaction will generate hostility to even the most basic of safety measures.

As governments let it rip, conspiracy theories will dominate.

It will be a bewildering, deadly mess.

In so much popular media coverage, pandemics are presented as an inevitability, but rarely is the obvious conclusion drawn: pandemics are products of systems.

We’re facing the prospect of a new pandemic every 10 or 20 years rather than every one hundred not because of bad luck or natural inevitability, but because of systemic features laid down by a ruling class that idolises money, not safety.

The ruling class can only ever double down on these features.

As they do so, day by day the danger to all of us grows.

A 30% chance of a new pandemic every 10 years is an unconscionable risk.

We need to drastically change these odds.

We need to drastically change this system.

(Cover art as always by @ronniefurbear on Instagram)