While at the start of the pandemic many of us were concerned about
everyone's health, we now feel very alone, four years later, wearing amask in public events. Individualism has taken over, against collectivethinking on health, chronic illness, and disability. How did we gethere? ---- In December 2019 SARS-CoV-2 began to spread in the city ofWuhan. Cases are multiplying and quickly dispersing internationally fromJanuary onwards at exponential speed. On March 11, 2020, the Covid-19epidemic was declared a pandemic by the WHO. On March 17, Franceexperienced its first national confinement. In April 2020, more than 4billion people were confined around the world to stop the spread of thevirus, the virulence of which threatens health systems.A pandemic with disastrous resultsFour years later, the toll of the pandemic is 7 million direct deathsfrom Covid-19. This figure rises to more than 27 million deaths whencounting all indirect deaths due to the consequences of the disease orfailures to treat other pathologies linked to overloading of hospitals.More than 700 million cases have been confirmed worldwide to date.Knowing that it is estimated that 10% of cases lead to long Covid, thepandemic has also created tens of millions of chronically ill people.In 2023, despite government denial, the pandemic is still there, but nowwe know it better. We know in particular that far from a simple "flu",SARS-CoV-2 is a virus which attacks the entire body: if the first andmain symptoms are generally respiratory, the virus also takes hold inthe central nervous system (source of characteristic loss of taste andsmell), the digestive system, cardiovascular system, etc. It alsodiffers from the flu by a gradual onset of symptoms, making it moredifficult to detect the onset of the disease. It is also followed bymore serious after-effects: long Covid, increased risk of stroke, heartattack and neurological disorders.To protect yourself and those around you, the most effective actionsremain wearing a mask (FFP2 ideally), ventilating rooms and vaccination(a campaign open to all audiences is currently underway).Eliminate Covid or live with it?The prospects for managing the pandemic quickly boil down to twoalternatives: suppression (or "Zero-Covid strategy") aimed at completelyeliminating the circulation of the virus, and mitigation, seeking moremodestly to slow down the circulation of the virus to protect the healthsystem without trying to stop the pandemic. Around fifteen countries areimplementing a more or less drastic Zero-Covid strategy (New Zealand,South Korea and China in particular). In 2021 a study[1]concludes thatwithin the OECD their results are significantly better than those ofother countries, in terms of health and economics but also in terms ofpreserving public freedoms.But quickly the majority of States turned to mitigation strategies,forcing populations to "live with" the virus in the words of EmmanuelMacron. This decision can be explained by several factors. Financiersand capitalists initially: after a succession of forced productionshutdowns, many economic sectors are putting pressure on a resumption ofactivity without constraints. The capitalists are also reluctant toallocate the public budgets necessary for the implementation of aZero-Covid strategy. On another front, a breakthrough in reactionary andeugenicist ideas from the far right is also pushing for this policy.Thus, the entire population should not have to make a collective effortto protect a minority of "people at risk", suggesting that public healthissues could be addressed at the individual level. This idea will benotably defended by the Great Barrington Declaration, a text produced bya libertarian think tank and widely distributed, influencing, amongother things, the Trump administration and various European conservativeparties. This text also supports the idea that "collective immunity"could develop naturally. This idea has since been widely demonstrated tobe false, particularly regarding SARS-CoV-2, a virus with one of thefastest rates of mutation in the world.The French government will be particularly enthusiastic in implementingthis policy of denial of the pandemic, deciding in particular togradually break down all the tools for measuring the circulation of thevirus: without figures, who can still say that the pandemic continues?The latest wave of contamination has also forced a backpedal and theresurrection of the SI-DEP[2]in the absence of reliable data.Validism, a blind spot on the leftThese reactions from states and capitalists were not a surprise. But thepandemic has also been a terrible revealer of the political andideological state of our social camp. If some initiatives were bornaround the notion of health self-defense, they often remained on a localscale, these ideas failing to break through within broader politicalmovements. The left's speeches were generally limited to a distantanalysis, with demands such as the refinancing or socialization of thehealth system, or the lifting of patents on vaccines. These measures arecertainly necessary, but which have often masked the lack of action andcommitment on the ground.The pandemic has also revealed the left's permeability to conspiratorialand anti-scientific discourse. The proposals of the Great BarringtonDeclaration were found across the political spectrum, including within aleft that had strayed too far from its rationalist and materialist ideasto detect untruths, and was too steeped in individualism. so as not togive in to the sirens of state eugenics. This is how government speecheswere able to impose themselves almost without any hindrance. A largepart of the left, happy to be able to move on to something else, alloweditself to be convinced by individualist speeches: after all, why botherwith a mask for a few "people at risk"?These biases have revealed a major blind spot regarding ableism: we arestill struggling to construct a vision of health and disability issuesthat is not paternalistic, and to question the social construction ofdisability. There is also a lot to do to rebuild the notion of socialsecurity, deeply damaged by decades of liberalism: thinking about thequestion of health as a collective objective, refusing to prioritizelives according to an ableist and capitalist standard.N. Bartosek (UCL Alsace)To validate[1]"SARS-CoV-2 elimination, not mitigation, creates best outcomes forhealth, the economy, and civil liberties", The Lancet, April 28, 2021.[2]National population screening information system, which centralizedscreening information and allowed a global vision of the pandemic.https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Pandemie-de-Covid-19-Ou-en-est-on-de-l-autodefense-sanitaire_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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