Post Reply - A new pandemic

Imagine describing an unprecedented attack on and dismantling of public transit resources and a leftist telling you, “yeah, but what can we do? People can always buy a car.” That’s the situation we find ourselves in with COVID- not only are we not winning, we aren’t even fighting. Not only are we not protecting people, we aren’t even outraged. To engage with the reality of this crisis, we need to understand how adopting an individualist approach to public health is destroying decades of labor activism, human rights progress, and hard-won protections.

The history of public health in this country and around the world is the history of disease eradication, mitigation, suppression, and prevention. The name of the public health body currently pushing “you do you” as a strategy is the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, for God’s sake.

 It’s not the Center for Diseases Are Fine and Go About Your Day. It was initially founded in 1946 as the Communicable Disease Center with a mandate to eliminate malaria. Not ignore. Not “learn to live with.” Eliminate. A word that, four years into the disaster capitalist response that took neoliberal abandonment to new heights, cannot even be uttered aloud anymore.