RSV immunity debt's fake and misfortunes hunt in packs
A friend sent me this paper arguing that covid contributed to the big rise in RSV cases and hospitalizations last year (covid infections suppress the immune system making it easier to get infected and have worse outcomes, and also damage the lungs, with damaged lungs the more susceptible to worse outcomes from RSV). I assume anyone reading this little blog of mine has already seen it but in case not it’s here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10582888/ That RSV wave was significantly framed ideologically as the result of so-called immunity debt, a concept which my sense is that science-understanders thing is bullshit. That ideological framing helps encourage infection - have to repay the debt! - and push against mitigations by framing mitigation as itself harmful to health. Insidious shit. I’m reminded of how the switch to online schooling was predicted to harm students’ mental health and cause so-called learning loss - again, an effort to say that the real harms were mitigation efforts. (It’s my understanding from what I’ve read by the suicidologist Tyler Black that the predicted rise in suicides from online school simply didn’t happen and that suicides for girls actually fell. Of course, as Black has stressed, suicide is a complex phenomenon not reducible to single causes, but it seems clear that the whole ‘actually the cure is worse than the disease’ schtick of objectively pro-infection ideologists was just false.) I'm unsure but I have a hunch that the above is significantly facilitated by what I called 'partial knowledges' in my last post, though some of this is also just straight up false!
I don’t know that I have the time, emotional wherewithal, or skills, but I suspect that plotting out all the ‘actually you should get sick because in fact that’s healthier than not, all things considered’ types of covid minimizer arguments and seeing if they have any shared content that clusters them together or if they’re entirely opportunistic and incoherent. I suspect it’s the first but I dunno.
I wanted to say, this post-covid-infection greater susceptibility to RSV is an example of what I’ll here call a vulnerability feedback loop. I may have talked about this before, I don’t recall and can’t be bothered to check. I heard Luke Beesley say in a talk “misfortunes hunt in packs.” He attributed it to Brecht but google turns it up as a quote from an English writer in the late 19th century, Eustace Clare Grenville Murray (four names? in THIS economy?) https://books.google.com/books?id=Ob8iaernZOwC&pg=PA257#v=onepage&q&f=false Luke, by the way, is part of the Marxism and Disability Network, a mostly UK-based group doing scholarship related to the terms in its name: https://marxismdisability.wordpress.com/ I’ve attended some of the talks on Zoom and they’ve been cool, definitely worth going to for people who have the time. Anyway, to run with the pack of misfortunes metaphor - one bites you, and while you’re being bit you’re slowed so another can bite you. Or, to put it another way, one harm means more needs thus more costs, often unmet needs as well, which all means more costs and less money and fewer other resources, which makes people more vulnerable to future harms. Infections in medical settings - nosocomial infections, I believe the fancy term is - are another example, as are bedsores and other harms that result from how capitalism’s imperatives play out in so-called care settings. (Health Communism discusses this, if memory serves, in terms of extractive abandonment: disabled people and other people counted as surplus are likely to end up being treated as fodder for institutions that use them to make money by providing them with care, often in oppressive ways, and where that care is significantly conditioned by its needing to be profitable to provide. https://www.versobooks.com/products/2801-health-communism) So harm feeds back creating more vulnerability thus greater likelihood of more harm, and harm feeds back creating more vulnerability thus greater likelihood of more harm, and... Misfortunes hunt in packs.
Two things strike me about this for now. One, this is just a straight forward downgrading in the quality of life of very many people, and the duration of life of many people as well, and the implication is once again along the lines of shut the fuck up and get in the wood chipper, peasant. We talked about this a little the last time I was on Death Panel (a great conversation with a lot of smart things said and also some things that I said, like how I marred the proceedings by my repeatedly saying ‘respirator’ when I meant to say ‘ventilator.’ In my defense it was late in the day and I’m not good at things.) https://soundcloud.com/deathpanel/unlimited-liabilities-w-nate-holdren-unlocked
Two, again the harms and their feeding back into more harms - the packs of hungry, vicious misfortunes - will concentrate worst on those lowest on the social food chain. That uneven distribution of harm helps, I think, with the ongoing production of ignorance (agnotology again!) or what Death Panel has called the sociological end of the pandemic. I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before but I’m not entirely sure where - I no longer like ‘manufacturing consent’ as the term for this as I think there is actually pretty significant lack of consent, and instead what we have are political projects and structural pressures combining to prevent dissent, albeit not entirely, thankfully.
This in turn has reminded me of this great bit by the great Simon Clarke: "It is important not to underestimate the extent to which the capitalist class seeks directly to impose its class interests on the state, and indeed such direct political intervention by sections of the capitalist class is a normal aspect of the functioning of the state. Direct political intervention can acquire decisive importance in periods of crisis that call for a restructuring of the forms of political domination. There is a tendency for sophisticated intellectual Marxists to turn their backs on the evidence of such direct interventions in order to concentrate on more subtle mechanisms. The development of the capitalist state form is not a spontaneous unfolding of the logic of capital, it is something arrived at through trial and error in the unfolding of the class struggle, conditioned to a considerable extent by the direct agency of sections of the capitalist class and so, incidentally, conditioned by the outcome of struggles within that class. However, behind the direct representation of the interests of the capitalist class lie the more fundamental, if less immediate, relations between capital and the state that serve to secure the domination of the capitalist class over the state." That’s from here: https://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/pubs/kapstate.pdf
I’d say, and I think Clarke would agree - the final line of that bit basically says this - that this “direct agency” of capitalists engaging in experiments to construct best practices in domination and more simply efforts to get one over on various people, is itself conditioned by the systemic patterns and logic of capitalism. Put simply, capitalism creates hard problems for all social actors (not the same problems for every social location, of course, and not ones of equal moral importance, to be sure!) which everyone tries to solve, often oppressively. As I’ve said before on here, I think, everyone’s riding the tiger of capitalist social relations and often as part of that trying to work to make it be others who get bit. Anyhow, I mention it because I think in the pandemic we’ve seen really clear examples of conscious deliberate efforts by capitalists and groups of capitalist and state actors, efforts to politic within the unstable, dynamic context of the pandemic, those efforts often amounting to variations on being accomplice in various ways to social murder and getting the nobodies to not be restive about our fate, with that working in tandem with processes that are more naturalized, more successfully depoliticized. To put it another way, in the pandemic a lot of the agency of capitalists and personnel of the capitalist state that Clarke mentioned has been exerted to (re)depoliticize or prevent the politicization of social murder in the specific forms it takes via covid (and the resulting further harms via vulnerability feedback loops).