COVID: Building a New Conversation

As of November 2024, the COVID-19 virus had infected a reported 777 million people worldwide, resulting in 7.1 million deaths, including some 1.2 million in the United States.¹ Placed in the context of other global crises and previous pandemics these numbers are not necess-arily as startling as their absolute numbers suggest. In 2023 alone, for example, some 8 million people died of tobacco-related diseases.² Numbers for the so-called Spanish Flu, little over a century ago, range between 50 and 100 million lives lost globally.³ Now, however, a few years since its 2020–2021 peaks, COVID-19 has been normalized and routinized, no longer prompting extra-ordinary interventions.⁴ These interventions – social distancing, masking, lockdowns, vacci-nations, etc. – are the subject of much contest – both in the popular con-versation and to a lesser degree in formal academic discourse. In fact, a recent paper on the disease’s economic impact finds that “the number of COVID-19 deaths had a very small effect in our aggregate sample … [while] changes in the stringency of the lockdown measures taken by governments to restrict the spread of the virus were an important influ-ence on GDP,”⁵ i.e., COVID deaths had less of an economic impact than did the steps taken to prevent further deaths. While this economic impact was huge, valued in the trillions of dollars and rivalling that of the Great Depression nearly a century earlier, neither the death rates nor the economic impacts are the subject of extraordinary controversy. The politicized and polarized reactions to the anti-COVID public health measures are the grist for the agitators’ mill. These reactions are credibly shown to have influenced the course of the disease and resulting outsized death rates in the United States.⁶ Indeed, a group of observers conclude, “we need to heal American politics if we are to ever bring the pandemic to an end.” Their argument is simple, if public health interventions are to succeed, they must have the support of the public; if instead such support is given to anti-vaccination and other anti-public health measures, the disease is likely to continue its expansion and mutation rendering the various measures ineffective, especially if a particularly lethal strain were to emerge. For Socialism and Democracy, then, the debate over perspectives carried in this decidedly non-medical, non-public health journal is consequential. Do we add to the skepti-cism about this or that measure, possibly adding to the pandemic’s present and future burdens?

Indeed, this conversation has rankled the minds of our editorial board and even the comity of many formally organized “knowledge vetting” organizations. With the nomination of the prominent vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to head the US Department of Health and Humans, the stakes have risen further: will our publication of a dissident view render us accomplices to a political intervention that results in more deaths?

Framed differently, Socialism and Democracy is a peer-reviewed journal, one aiming to build robust conversations within the Marxist tradition by using critical evaluations from qualified reviewers and editorial board members to assess the suitability of a particular work for publication. Does publication of “dissident” public health views result in our journal’s imprimatur and the “peer-review” label being attached to this or that article, possibly diminishing the value of other articles published? While we will offer a straight-forward answer to this question below, several other points bear mentioning.

Ours is also a multi-disciplinary journal to the degree that diverse methodologies of inquiry are brought to bear on subject matters foreign to the origins of such methodologies. For example, we have published works of literary criticism to shed light on political orga-nizing.⁷ To some degree, shaped by its socialist values and Marxist problematics, Socialism and Democracy is also trans-disciplinary utiliz-ing a common set of methodologies – class analysis and political economy – across a range of different subject matters. The resulting vast range of methodologies and subject matters poses a peculiar set of challenges that are illustrated when one considers the opposite situation: a single set of methodologies applied to a small number of subject matters and time periods. In this situation, researchers, writers, editors, reviewers and readerships are more likely to operate from within a very coherent knowledge and discursive framework: they may therefore be more aware of the value of this or that set of conclusions, the implied and therefore unstated pre-mises and trade-offs, etc. In our multi- and trans-disciplinary frame-works and subject matters as diverse as totality itself, extreme care must be taken when pulling data and arguments from one field and deploying it in another. This care, nay responsibility, is greatly amplified by the relative ease of access, created by the internet, to many bodies of knowledge. It is therefore possible to hop, skip and jump across many literatures to cite this or that evidence in favor of one’s arguments or to inform one’s skepticism.

        We call attention to the above diversity of knowledges because it is easily possible then for the authorship, peer-review and eventual pub-lication to produce articles where authors, reviewers and even readers at large to use arguments and methodologies drawn from this or that tradition or discipline to be entirely ignorant of the debates that have produced such methodologies and data sets. This danger is increased especially when one moves from the “softer” social sciences to the “harder” natural sciences. For Marxists, in particular, this is a danger-ous temptation, after all, a significant part of our heritage is the pursuit of a single, underlying materialist ontology and dialectical materialist methodology to inform all scientific exploration, natural and social.

If the foregoing cautions about contemporary knowledge develop-ment and scientific exploration are intimidating, they become radically more potent when the science enters the rough and tumble world of political debate, science is then reduced to rhetoric, with one or another, or more often than not, all, deployer(s) claiming the mantle of science as theirs.

In the present case, we want to foster a conversation about COVID-19 by publishing an article that represents a condensation of several debates that occur at the “fringes” of mainstream discourse about vaccines, COVID therapies, public health measures and the out-sized power of the highly financialized but also publicly subsidized pharmaceutical industry. In doing so, we are not endorsing the ideas presented but agitating for further conversation. We are demanding that such views, however unscientific, as some charge, receive attention from Marxist public health professionals and from popular movements. Preventing the circulation of such views results in their uncontested dissemination within the working class. Challen-ging such views, especially their failure to understand the natural course of disease progression (now very well understood through epi-demiological means), further increases the capacity of our movements to advocate for policies and practices that conform to working class interests and transcendence of the capitalist imperatives driving certain disease responses.

We should note that many of the Kennedy-inspired approaches are generally divorced from grassroots and socialist-inspired public health movements such as the international People’s Health Assembly. These generally address matters of health inequalities, injustice, and access – both on global and national scales. Vaccine apartheid – the hoarding of vaccine patents by the corporations of the Global North – is at the heart of much of their advocacy and organizing. The latter is the organic outcome of their direct engagement with patients and research pro-jects; it not merely a select review of literatures.

By contrast, the Kennedy-inspired approaches tend to be inno-cent of such concerns and instead pre-occupied by libertarian themes such as “bodily autonomy,” construed in universal and ahis-torical terms, quite unlike that of the women’s movements’ right to choice. Of course, for Marxists, this libertarian turn, unlike, for example the socially grounded claims of the People’s Health Assem-blies and associated movements for democratizing global health governance,⁸ are broadly unacceptable. In the future, we expect a broader engagement between these approaches. Sooner, rather than later, given the urgency brought by a new Trump administration.

During the Biden administration, right-wing state governors, like Ron DeSantis of Florida, were able to effectively exploit working class precarity, inherent to capitalism, toward populists ends. Unlike other states engaging in lockdowns, workers in Florida were spared lockdowns ensuring their access to the paychecks upon which their lives depended – even if it resulted in a dispropor-tionately high death toll.⁹ This faux populism proved politically advantageous with DeSantis easily winning reelection and securing the state for future Republican campaigns.¹⁰ DeSantis’s success points to the challenges facing leftists lacking both state power and organizational coherence when engaging the topic: the health and incomes of the working class are placed in opposition to one another without the left being able to promote either – even though we need to do advance both.

In future essays, it is our hope that contributors take inspiration from the scientific approach to public health matters and contagion, the introduction of spatial/geographic relations structuring the experi-ence of class, offered by a youthful Frederick Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Here Engels, anticipating the future emergence of epidemiology, recognized the role of population density and proximity to factories as important determinants of public health.

From a 21st century vantage point, we can now look back at the wisdom developed within epidemiology to understand both the spread of COVID-19 and the unique complexities created by the math-ematics of a disease spread by asymptomatic individuals. The resulting policy incoherence – to mask up or to physically distance, for examples – is entirely understandable but also the fuel for conspiratorial think-ing. The ignorance of empirical dynamics driving the spread of the dissease, however, creates the space for the conspiratorial thinking modeled by Kennedy.

With these scattered observations, we invite further contributions to the COVID conversation.

1. Of course, these numbers are subject to several cautions including the possibility that countries with weaker health surveillance systems fail to report/detect their COVID-19 deaths. Please see the World Health Organization’s website for the best available data: “COVID-19 Deaths,” WHO COVID-19 Dashboard, December 6, 2024, https:// data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/cases.

2. “Tobacco Fact Sheet,” World Health Organization, December 6, 2024, https://www. who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tobacco.

3. Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, First

US edition (New York: Public Affairs, 2017).

It is noteworthy that despite the much larger Spanish flu global death rates, US COVID-19 deaths by 2024 were nearly twice that of the Spanish Flu total of 675,000 in spite of the tools available to modern medicine and public health.

4. “US COVID-19 Cases and Deaths by State,” USAFacts, January 22, 2020, https:// usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spread-map/.By mid-2023, this “go-to” website for COVID-19 data had stopped tracking the disease.

5. Joseph E. Gagnon, Steven B. Kamin, and John Kearns, “The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Global GDP Growth,” Journal of the Japanese and International Economies 68 (June 2023): 101258, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jjie.2023.101258.

6. Shana Kushner Gadarian, Sara Wallace Goodman, and Thomas B. Pepinsky, Pan-demic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).

7. See for example, Joseph G. Ramsey, “Sifting the ‘Stony Soil’ of Black Marxism: Cedric Robinson, Richard Wright, and Ellipses of the Black Radical Tradition,” Socialism and Democracy 34, no. 2–3 (September 1, 2020): 1–31, https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.

8. People’s Health Movement, “PHM 2023 Annual Report - The Post Covid Struggle For Health and The Road to Mar Del Plata,” 2024, https://phmovement.org/sites/ default/files/2024-06/PHM%202023%20Annual%20Report%20EN.pdf.

9. “Florida – COVID-19 Overview,” Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, accessed December 8, 2024, https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/florida. Note: JHU ceased data collection in March 2023. The State of Florida however stopped reporting on September 21, 2022.

10. Dylan Scott, “How Ron DeSantis Transformed into an Anti-Public Health Crusa-der,” Vox, April 27, 2023, https://www.vox.com/policy/23682263/ron-desantis-covid-19-vaccines-joseph-ladapo.