"Herd immunity"—the eugenic abandonment of public health

Preamble: I haven’t been publishing on here because I haven’t felt like any of my thoughts on Covid have been fully developed But I’m taking encouragement from Nate Holdren and Abby Cartus and deciding to just get them out there anyway in the hopes of spurring thought and conversation amongst the small handful of people who are still spending their days wondering about social murder and the ongoing pandemic.

There needs to be a public reckoning for all those public health professionals who preached "herd immunity”. These so-called experts have repeatedly doubled down despite evidence conclusively proving they were catastrophically wrong. They played a key role in manufacturing consent for the government's eugenic policies of normalisation and took the sting out of potential solidaristic politics at a key moment. To put it bluntly: there’s blood on their hands.

There was a vital window in 2020 to resist the abandonment of public health and the idea of get the virus once, or the vaccine, and then "get on with your life". It has had, and will continue to have, disastrous effects for everyone. Millions have died, tens of millions have suffered disablement, and many will get sick with a virus every 6-12 months that will cause them to take time off work and losing money.

As Nate Holdren puts it:

"Like, OF COURSE a society that marks so many for discarding will also generate ideologies that help people become okay with that discarding."

And as he also says elsewhere: of course these people will find themselves in positions of power in a system as murderous as capitalism.

Herd immunity was one of those key (eugenic) concepts and should've been fought tooth and nail with every bit of (potential) power the left had. Herd immunity is eugenic because it consigned many to death, who are, for whatever socio-biological reasons (ie the biological is mediated by the social), unable to live safely in a world where SARS-CoV-2 is permitted to freely circulate.

The vaccine played a key ideological and agnotological role in demotivating solidaristic politics. It was the moment when Covid decisively shifted to the individual. When the burden of risk was firmly placed on our individual shoulders. If you got Covid after that then it was your own fault—your own problem—the state had done all it could.

from this tweet

Of course, there was never a flattened, homogenised “we”, as was too often repeated during the height of the coronavirus emergency—some could zoom off to the country, or be safe at home, whilst others had to continue turning up to work in unsafe environments or were confined to unsafe violent homes. I’m not suggesting the breakdown in solidarity happened organically or spontaneously within the social body—it was the result of sustained coercion—ideological and material.

And let’s be honest the broader left (with a few exceptions) joined in with abandoning sick, disabled and immunocompromised people. The majority of left institutions, organisations and publications still fail to show solidarity and even do the bare basics. We’re still being told that the demands of disabled people cannot be met due to budgetary constraints. Most of the left is going along with the social murder of “the pandemic is over”. This is not an aberration for the broader left but a continuity of its abject disability politics. One of the central points of left politics is to fight the naturalisation of the social murder and misery of capitalism. To politicise against the countervailing capitalist will to naturalise.

The vaccine was a key moment as it meant the vast majority of people would not die from the virus. It successfully reduced the fatality rate to a number that most people were happy to go along with. People could tell themselves (however repressed, disavowed or foreclosed)—as the media did from day one—”it’s only old people and disabled people who die from Covid”. Add on top of that the reduced risk of Long Covid, it successfully provided enough safety to enough people to provide the opportunity to end solidaristic politics and “get back to normal”.

Disclaimer: lest I be accused of being an anti-vaxxer—I’m not. The vaccine was an important breakthrough, although a) it was premised on imperialist unequal exchange and global vaccine bio-apartheid and b) new and better vaccines should be developed and c) there was nothing inevitable about the “vaxxed and relaxed” approach. Vaccination didn’t have to coincide with the abandonment of remaining public health policies in the UK.

“Vaxed and relaxed” was about getting the economy going again, it was not about our collective safety. It has caused untold misery for sick, disabled and immunocompromised people—now significantly less able to exist safely in society. It was a real “mask off” moment. But all the big public health professionals and institutions got behind it—telling people it was safe to be exposed to Covid again—and people believed it (again however disavowed, repressed or foreclosed their own disbelief).

The failure from a political perspective was to cede the potential of the crisis. In every crisis there is potential. There was a time for workers to strike for a safer workplace (this option still exists, as I argued in Red Pepper earlier this year). To push back against the social murder meat grinder. The unions failed workers miserably during 2020 (and since re Covid). Workplaces should’ve been forced to implement HEPA filtration and ventilation funded by central governments. Masks should’ve remained commonplace in public spaces until, at the very least, cleaner air was achieved. The greatest potential for resistance exists with healthcare workers and teachers—as hospitals and schools are the key drivers of transmission.

The failure of the Covid left—for want of a much better phrase—was largely to outsource the political subject to the crisis itself. This comes in the guise “eventually people will REALISE how bad Covid is and then action will be taken”. This widespread position stems from a belief in the state as a somewhat rational, if at times misguided actor. It imagines that the Tories (or the Democrats etc) do have a kernel of rationality and respectability, underneath all that corruption and greed. It’s the ideology of bourgeois liberal politics that we’ve all been spoonfed growing up, so it’s well ingrained into our psyches. It’s a total fantasy that helps manufacture consent for liberal capitalism, but a powerful one. “IF ONLY THEY COULD BE CONVINCED”, is what people tell themselves, “IF ONLY THINGS GOT BAD ENOUGH”. This fallacy demobilises political opposition.

This delusion ignores the state as a site of class interests, class conflict and political struggle. And capitalists and the conservative right are firmly in control of the state. The state acts as an extension of capital—managing its populace, whilst ensuring its own survival. Capitalism is parasitic and the state is maybe the nucleus of that parasite, providing a core capacity for capital to reproduce itself. Through state institutions, through policies, through cultural institutions (eg the BBC), through violent and coercive control of the populace via the police and military (which let’s not forget played a key role in the pandemic emergency in suppressing collective politics).

We’re taught that liberal democracies are democracies when in reality they are a hollowed out shell of democracy. They reduce democracy to a vote for a shitty party every 5 years. The problem with the Covid left is that it was dominated by liberals and liberalism has always been about securing the liberty of some at the expense of others and thus the “vaxxed and relaxed” approach conformed to liberal logics.

Side tangent: I think there’s a problem when “we” talk about the potential of Covid to maim 10% of the population that ignores the fact that the vast majority of people might never experience the worst effects of Covid. There is a line that goes: “after your tenth infection you’re certain to suffer Long Covid” — but there isn’t enough evidence to support that assertion. It’s simply not known—although, granted, the precautionary principle should apply.

Going back to unions. I’m not the most optimistic on the power of British trade unions—they frequently let people down and I think their politics generally leave a lot to be desired. That said, they still have the potential to wield power and this year many unions won pay rises. Unions could go much further and enforce safer workplaces. Unions are not a form of collective struggle we should abandon and I’m not sure how many other options there are right now? But that doesn’t mean it’s happening tomorrow. There is a huge amount of work to be done to get unions to realise this and I’m not wholly optimistic that will happen. But theoretically it’s possible. Those who know more about unions and are involved in union organising can better elaborate this.

This piece could end on a bit of a downer sorry, but you don’t get into Covid politics if you’re looking for feel-good inspiration. But fear not I’ll plagiarise from my piece on British health worker strikes in Red Pepper which ends on a more motivational note:

This is a time to push for not just essential pay increases but also safer working environments. It’s not just a case of solidarity with colleagues debilitated by the virus— one infection can shift you from the category of worker to ‘surplus’. These strikes require all of us to stand in solidarity with healthcare workers. Unions must be held to account to represent their members with Long COVID, disability and who are immunocompromised. After all, our ability to live with the illness capitalism imposes depends upon the NHS to be there for us when we’re sick and injured. This is an opportunity to grow a larger political movement that unites workers across the country with the millions of sick and disabled people (and their loved ones) who are still forced to live in fear of (re)infection. Despite proclamations to the contrary, the pandemic is far from over.

If health worker unions don’t put COVID safety back on the table, then who can? The workers that have been most affected are the most obvious place for pushing back on the normalisation of continued death, debility and disability of COVID-19. The ongoing pandemic continues to impede healthcare. If healthcare workers were to push back against the government’s policy of forced reinfection then we might see other sectors of society follow suit. Healthcare workers are best placed, with us all in collective solidarity, to resist the ongoing social murder and social maiming of austerity and the pandemic, and improve the collective safety of everyone.