Covid Ends?

Watching season two of “Sprint” on Netflix recently, American sprinter Noah Lyles says from the 2024 Paris Olympics that the covid pandemic is over. For him, it’s the place and time to run fast and self-promote faster.

He does both. First, Lyles wins the 100 meters dash in a photo finish. His performance before, during and after winning this gold medal shows that it’s not bragging when an elite athlete predicts a victory and achieves it.

Later, things change. Lyles contracts covid before the finals of the men’s 200 meters dash. The virus basically ends his bid for a gold medal in the 200 meters.

Let’s look past Lyles at the 2024 Paris Olympics. As many Americans have died of covid during President Biden’s administration that perished when President Donald J. Trump occupied the White House.

Read all about that and much more in The Fault in Our SARS: COVID-19 in the Biden Era by Rob Wallace (Monthly Review Press, 2023). In their money-saturated run for the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris and Presidential Donald J. Trump chose to sidestep US deaths from covid during and after the pandemic.

In Wallace’s view, covid is a symptom of the Earth System in distress. Consider as he does corporate-driven environmental destruction. This unleashes viruses previously contained to non-capitalist areas.

The drive for growth causes this chain of events. Fossil fuels propel the clearing of land for corporate agriculture to feed the working classes of global capitalism. That process is expanding.

Agribusiness depends on petroleum-based fertilizers. That energy dependency, a requirement of industrial farming, disrupts what Marx called the metabolism between human beings and nature.

Marx read the work of Justus von Liebig, a leading soil scientist of the time. Capitalism, with state intervention (not Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand) pushes peasants off their land and into cities to become wage workers, a violent severing of organic ties between human beings and Mother Earth.

The late Michael Perelman, an author and economics professor at Cal State Chico, in The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Duke University Press, 2000), reveals how Smith and economists of the era like David Ricardo downplayed legal penalties such as the Game Laws that made self-sufficiency—hunting and gathering on common lands—impossible for peasants in pre-capitalist England. Legal penalties pushed them off the land and forced them into cities to work for wages.

More recently, the industrialization of China saw hundreds of millions of former peasants become hourly employees in non-farm labor. China became the world’s workshop. Feeding the workers involved in this historic creates ecological changes on a never before seen scale.

First the dynamic of social dislocation disrupts the metabolic cycle in the countryside. Meanwhile, waste accumulates in urban areas along with toxic byproducts from industry that produces commodities for sale in the marketplace.

We have a social order creating the environmental destruction and pollution that breeds disease and sickness. These metabolic changes propel the rise of infectious diseases like covid and the pandemics to come. Noah Lyles’ mistaken view about the ending of covid speaks to the rampant disinformation available 24/7.

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