Maybe I’m too cynical, but that’s what I got from it. The video way overstates the ease of DIY viral research and understates how tightly regulated it already is.
I agree with what you say. But I finally have an excuse to break out the cool image that is a representation of COVID RNA:
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. ~30 kilobases. That image, put together as an RNA sequence, made for a world plague. I don’t know about anyone else but it scares me how a 200 x 200 pixel image could contain enough information to do that.
What it really calls for is serious investment into healthcare and antiviral research. But that isn’t military spending.
That image, put together as an RNA sequence, made for a world plague.
According to Mao, the external influence of COVID19 on the western imperialist world order only created a world plague because of the internal contradictions between the “profit motive at all costs” mentality of the political economy and the fact that workers have to produce the surplus value required for such profit by being in a situation where transmission is inevitable as time tends towards infinity. There was also a contradiction between the essential nature of competition in the world economy and the requirement for cooperation between nations to contain/eliminate the virus.
As such, human life was sacrificed for the profit motive and the western bourgeoisie as a whole let the virus spread amongst the workforce instead of implementing controls which would make work safer but jeopardize profit. Furthermore, they prevented poorer countries from having the formulae for vaccines so that they could be in control of distribution and profit from sales.
Since it is more profitable to catch a man a fish so he can eat for a day (at your price) instead of teaching him to fish so he eats for free.
I for sure don’t disagree that a society that prioritised human health could have dealt with the plague far more swiftly and efficiently. But COVID-19 was uniquely plague-ready by being both novel to humans and still highly infectious, so you gotta give the virus some credit.
It was widely known among epidemiologists that a coronavirus based outbreak was just a matter of time. A more serious society could have done way more.
-
With just the tools we had: The US had a program to distribute masks that was never activated. Cancelling international flights earlier, and actually quarantining cities, could have limited it to just a handful of cities outside of China. We could have distributed vaccines everywhere instead of enforcing international bans on vaccines developed by US pharma companies.
-
With governments that take public health seriously: Coronavirus outbreaks were a known risk; preemptive vaccine research could have been funded more, leading to faster vaccine development turnarounds when a variant started infecting humans.
-
With a more serious society overall: We could do planned two month global lockdowns once a decade or so, and eliminate COVID, the flu, the common cold, a vast number of unnamed respiratory illnesses, and more.
Is that known? I haven’t kept up but it was never my impression.
There were specific material situations which allowed this pwrticular pathogen to spread. Having to do with patterns of people living and moving, all highly influence by economics. Likely such pathogens pop into existence all the time but the stars do not align and they don’t come to attention.
Ebola was a novel virus in the 70s and it is highly infectious but it was fairly limited in scope.
HIV on the other hand was new about 100 years ago, with infectiousness close to zero. It is basically a miracle to seroconvert. But look at its impact. Once again, everything to do with material conditions.
Trade routes are central to all 4 of the above viruses iirc.
We must ensure that world wide plagues can only come from one place - Fort Detrick.
of course their solution is to forbid and restrict the technology, rather than create a global standard for healthcare
both of these two options are absurd in their scope and necessary coordination/workload/resources, but only one of them is stupid
The real question is why anyone would make a superplague in their garage when warehouse space is so cheap and readily available in most urban environments
Neolib dogshit. It’s the similar excuse to how India shouldn’t be allowed to make generic covid vaccines.
