Covid: A Dry Run For Environmental Breakdown
Twinsies! One Emergency Illuminates Another
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1. Twin Disasters
One of the difficulties with applying scientific techniques to issues affecting human beings is that, to put it bluntly, there are some experiments that you’d never want to do on actual people—nor would you be allowed to.
There are occasional exceptions, of course, when human decency is left out of the equation. The Tuskegee syphilis study, for instance, or the intentionally-separated-at-birth triplets documented in the film Three Identical Strangers. And, of course, Unit 731. And the experiments of Joseph Mengele. Ok, there are quite a few exceptions.
1. "Racism and research: The case of the Tuskegee Syphilis study." Allan M. Brandt. The Hastings Center Report 8(6): 21-29. (1978)
2. “The Trial that Never Happened: Josef Mengele and the Twins of Auschwitz,” Grodin et al. War Crimes, Genocide & Crimes against Humanity, Volume 5 (2011): 3‐89].
3. “The Holocaust and Dr. Josef Mengele,” Dario Vlaar-Maldonado. Revista [IN]Genios, Vol. 6, Núm. 2, pp.1-6 (junio, 2020).
4. Three Identical Strangers (2018), IMDB
5. “Biohazard: Unit 731 in Postwar Japanese Politics of National ‘Forgetfulness’” Frederick R. Dickinson,” Frederick R. Dickinson. The Asian-Pacific Journal, Volume 5, Issue 10, Oct 01, 2007.
Despite these outliers, there should be, and there usually is, a very narrow scope allowed for human experimentation.
But sometimes circumstances—like natural disasters and political policies— create accidental experiments, often called natural experiments, that can be useful to study something even if it’s horrifying.
Twins raised in different homes from each other for legitimate (or at least non-experimental) reasons, for instance, allow us to compare outcomes, which can tell us a lot about what characteristics are most associated with genetics (which the twins will tend to share), and which are more shaped by environment (where they might differ greatly).
For the cluster of issues that make up the deadly environmental polycrisis (see “I Want More Life, F*cker (Part I) for details), the Covid-19 pandemic provides a useful accidental experiment, at least in some respects, allowing us to ask questions that are relevant to both the pandemic and the polycrisis.
For example:
When people are confronted with mass death, do they tend to (a) face facts and behave so as to protect themselves and others, or do they (b) go into denial so as to avoid the emotional difficulty of facing the situation honestly?
In such an emergency, to the extent that there’s a choice, do governments, businesses, and other institutions tend to (a) protect the lives and health of people or (b) protect their own profits and other sources of power ?
There are a lot of questions like these that will be important as we try to create environmental measures that had, at certain times and in certain ways, a real-world dry run with Covid-19.
Covid’s sudden, deadly appearance gave all of us a chance to assess, as far as the available information would allow, the effectiveness of various forces during a large-scale emergency: political decision-makers and civilian government bodies (including police), the military, business leaders, experts, and ordinary citizens (individually, in organized groups, in coalitions, and in more or less impromptu gatherings and events such as protests).
The response was a terrifying mess.
This is a big question, and much of the evidence isn’t available yet, so I’ll post about it more than once. This post is about government action and inaction in the big picture. I’m focused on the capitalist countries of “the West” (we really need a better term), but I’ll touch on China for a point of comparison.
2. It’s Called A Plan For A Reason
You might think, looking at the results, that our governments were simply badly prepared, but within scientific and political circles a serious zoonotic pandemic—a pandemic that originates in non-human animals, that then infects humans—was expected to erupt at some point.
6. “COVID-19, chronicle of an expected pandemic,” Philippe J Sansonetti. EMBO Mol Med 12:e12463 (2020). DOI: 10.15252/emmm.202012463
We even had several zoonotic warning shots across the bow: SARS-1 and MERS, both of which were coronaviruses, and H1N1, for instance. Plus swine flu, ebola, and HIV. As a result, many countries had prepared fairly well, but for some reason all that preparation didn’t produce successful anti-Covid efforts.
There was a chart that made the rounds of social media in 2020. It used the Global Health Security Index to show the purported “readiness” of different countries for dealing with a pandemic. If its readiness ratings had matched with the actual outcomes during the pandemic, no one outside health policy circles would have noticed it. High readiness would have produced good results—nothing shocking in that.
But it was so deeply wrong, so upside-down, that it became a meme.
For example, the United States was rated at the top, as most ready, with China a whole category lower. China and Brazil, meanwhile, were in the same category, rather than having very good and very bad results, respectively.
In the real world, however, the U.S. and Brazil had some of the worst death rates in the world, while China did far better than either of them.
So what happened?
3. The Best Laid Plans
Dr. Stuart Gilmour is a professor of biostatistics at the graduate school of public health at St. Luke's International University who has published extensively on public health and policy in relation to infectious diseases, including the Covid-19 response. In as-yet unpublished research, he examined the Global Health Security Index and found that, in fact, the scale it used was well-designed.
7. “Remember in 2020 there was a map showing how well-prepared different countries were, which received widespread derision for its terrible accuracy? I analyzed the underlying data to see how poorly it predicted pandemic outcomes,” Stuart Gilmour (@drStuartGilmour). Twitter (X), February 14, 2022.
And yet, the scores assigned to the various countries reflected the opposite of what happened in real life.
“I downloaded the 2019 data and linked it to WHO data on total COVID-19 cases, deaths and vaccinations, and UN population data. I then used Poisson regression to explore the relationship between the total readiness score and these outcomes.
I found clear evidence that the more ‘ready’ a country was on the score, the worse it performed. Every 1 point increase in the score meant a 5% increase in total infections.”
Why? The problem, he concluded, wasn’t with the scale, or with the plans that it evaluated, the problem was with the people in charge of implementing the plan:
“The scale is not badly designed—it’s a careful, thoughtful compilation of detailed info about 195 countries… It doesn’t work because like many policy assessments it assumes that the documented policies will actually be implemented, and that there is some relationship between the policies on the books and their implementation. But what we actually saw in practice in 2020 was that although rich countries had the policies in place, most refused to enact them for fear of endangering the economy...”
Applying this lesson to the case of our intensifying environmental disaster should scare the hell out of you (as it does Gilmour at the very end of his thread).
In an emergency, all the planning in the world won’t make any difference if the plan isn’t implemented by the people with the legal authority to do so and the brute force power to back it up. We just watched more than a million people die in the United States, about 20-30 million people around the world, many of them for no reason at all except that the people in authority didn’t want profits to stop flowing.
Gilmour’s thread is worth reading in its entirety, so I’ve included it at the end of this post. But to be clear, he isn’t the only person to reach this kind of conclusion.
4. Real-World Planning I: Neoliberalism
Radhika Desai is a professor in the department of Political Studies, and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group, at the University of Manitoba. In her book, Capitalism, Coronavirus, And War (PDF available free from the publisher—use link in note), she aligns with Gilmour’s conclusion that capitalist states were unwilling to use effective measures against Covid-19 because it would impose an unacceptable price on corporations in the form of lost profits.
8. Capitalism, Coronavirus, And War. Radikha Desai. Routledge, London, 2023. Free PDF from Publisher here.
Then she adds to that thesis.
First, she independently reaches the same conclusion as Gilmour:
…nothing was clearer than that authorities in the leading neoliberal countries were more concerned about financial markets of every imaginable sort plunging to historic depths than about the saving citizens’ lives from the pandemic.
Two years later, it is clear that the response of leading neoliberal financialised capitalisms, dominated by attempt to balance ‘saving lives’ with ‘saving livelihoods’ (a euphemism for the neoliberal financialised capitalist economy) ended up losing both as the raging virus necessitated repeated lockdowns, weakening economies further and they registered among the highest rates of cumulative COVID deaths.
But then Desai argues that, besides being unwilling, governments that had followed the neoliberal path for the previous forty years had also, in the process, made themselves less capable of taking strong measures.
The only really effective strategy would have been one variously labelled maximum suppression or zero COVID, as advocated early on by a prominent group of independent medical experts in the United Kingdom, the Independent SAGE.
…
One of the earliest Independent SAGE reports, published in June 2020, spelled out what a zero COVID or maximum suppression strategy would involve: a Find, Test, Trace, Isolate and Support (FTTIS) system (Independent SAGE 2020b) run by locally based well-trained health professionals with the trust of the communities they served. This is the time-tested strategy that saves both lives and livelihoods and does not leave behind the poor and marginalised. A similar if less active group of Canadian medics also recommended such a strategy in its report ‘Building the Canadian Shield’ (COVID Strategic Choices Group 2020). While many countries have pursued some version of this strategy—Australia, New Zealand, China, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, Uruguay, Finland and Norway—China has pursued it most consistently and against great odds, without, for instance, enjoying the luxury of being a remote island country or having a sparse population.
Each component of FTTIS is critical. Finding cases is best done through targeted, not mass, testing of vulnerable or exposed groups. Mass testing can be a wasteful exercise and often an act of choice by asymptomatic individuals who can afford to isolate or wish to travel. Contacts must be traced forward to locate all those who may have been infected by a given case and backward to the original event that began the chain of infections. Isolation has to be strict, supervised and, critically, supported with adequate income and social and medical supports. When left to unsupported individuals, isolation imposes on many who must work to support themselves and dependents the cruel choice of infecting others or losing income and failing to provide. Maximum suppression cannot succeed without generous and multifaceted supports for isolation.
All this requires a public health structure that is decentralised, local, community-based, staffed with health care professionals possessing a variety of health and public health-related skills, is committed to people and community and operates with a high degree of trust, precisely the sort of system neoliberalism has spent the last many decades destroying.
There’s your optimal plan, but because public health systems in the US (and many other countries) had been hollowed out by the neoliberal, single-minded pursuit of profit, capitalist states were ill-equipped to implement it. They were also unwilling, and often ideologically opposed to, funding FTTIS or the income, social, and medical supports necessary to make isolation effective. And even if they’d been willing, they were ill-equipped for the task because their social welfare structures had been rapaciously starved and allowed to atrophy over forty years of neoliberal anti-statism.
The failure to implement an effective Covid-19 plan highlights the difference—and often conflict—between a scientifically coherent emergency plan based on saving the maximum number of lives and a plan that will save lives as long as doing so doesn’t interfere with profits too much—what was called “balancing lives and livelihoods.”
There were specific features within neoliberal capitalism that affected particular industries as well, including the production of personal protection equipment (PPEs) and pharmaceuticals, that interfered with capitalist nations’ ability, or willingness, to meet a health crisis head on. As Susan Sell notes in “What COVID-19 Reveals About Twenty-First Century Capitalism: Adversity and Opportunity”:
The three largest makers of N95 respirator masks, 3M, Honeywell and Kimberly-Clark, have also pursued this financialized approach and have tightly held the multiple patents on the masks (Lazonick and Hopkins 2020). Critical shortages of personal protective equipment such as N95 masks and ventilators have been partly due to the exclusive rights that IP confers. This has slowed down the production and distribution of this vital PPE. Ventilator production was hampered when larger firms acquired smaller innovative companies that were producing affordable ventilators in order to quash the potential competition and maintain the larger firms’ higher prices (Kulish et al. 2020).
9. “What COVID‑19 Reveals About Twenty‑First Century Capitalism: Adversity and Opportunity,” Susan K. Sell. Development, 63(2-4):150-156, 2020. DOI: 10.1057/s41301-020-00263-z.Epub 2020 Nov 6.
Meanwhile, China’s Zero Covid policy kept death rates far lower. Overall, how have the two approaches worked out?
First, both countries had around the same number of infections (US: 103,436,829 / CN: 99,373219). There’s a difference of about four million people, but out of a hundred million or so, that’s pretty close.
10. Census.gov (June 2, 2025)
Second, China has about 4.1 times the population of the US (US: 341,869,297 / CN: 1,407,181,209). That means that China had far fewer infections per capita, about a quarter of what the US had, despite the pandemic starting there.
The number of deaths is not even a competition. Again, China has four times the people, but the US had almost ten times as many deaths (9.8).
To see how all these factors interact with population, we can look at the figures for deaths per million people. The US had 41.1 times the deaths per million people that China had.
5. Real-World Planning II: Neocolonialism
So far, I’ve looked at domestic policy with regard to covid, but foreign policy on this front is also relevant as a lens through which to view our likely response to the environmental issues we’re facing—maybe even more so—a fact that became increasingly evident once vaccines become available.
An effective response to Covid, as with the environmental polycrisis, was dependent upon a transparent, durable system of global cooperation, with the United States in a critical role:
The response to the COVID-19 pandemic and in particular the equitable distribution of vaccines is one of the most important tests of global cooperation that the world has faced in recent decades. Without global cooperation, as one author starkly noted, ‘the course and consequences of the pandemic cannot be resolved or addressed’ (Fazal, 2020: E91). It is not the only such vital challenge—the need to stop climate breakdown is another major one…
11. “COVID-19 vaccine apartheid and the failure of global cooperation,” Stephen Brown and Morgane Rosier. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations Vol. 25(3):535–554 (2023). DOI: 10.1177/13691481231178248
In general, the overwhelming response of wealthy capitalist nations has been to treat covid primarily as a domestic issue, rather than an global one—or at least to prioritize their own domestic electoral interests, and domestic corporations’ profits, over global health.
Even before vaccines were developed, the countries that could gain an advantage by undermining global cooperation, the wealthy countries, undermined it:
…leaders, especially those from high-income countries, failed abysmally to live up to their rhetoric and respond to the pandemic from a global perspective (Brown and Rosier, 2023; Dentico, 2021). Global cooperation had already collapsed in early 2020, when countries sealed their borders and competed savagely for limited supplies of personal protective equipment (Moon et al., 2022: 487).
12. “COVID-19 vaccine apartheid and the failure of global cooperation,” Stephen Brown and Morgane Rosier. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations Vol. 25(3):535–554 (2023). DOI: 10.1177/13691481231178248
Once vaccines were developed, the US and other capitalist nations that could, hoarded vaccines for themselves, broke funding promises for COVAX (a multilateral, equitable system of vaccine distribution that would have prevented hoarding) and did end-runs around its system by ordering vaccines direct from western pharmaceutical corporations, then defended the profits of those very corporations by stonewalling temporary allowances within intellectual property laws that would have allowed less wealthy nations to create low-cost generic versions of the vaccines.
Wealthy countries subsequently eschewed the ad hoc multilateral vaccine acquisition mechanism that they had helped set up and signed purchasing agreements directly with pharmaceutical companies, locking up much of global supplies. They also blocked efforts at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to waive patents temporarily, which would have permitted more vaccines to be produced at an earlier stage of the pandemic. As a result, third and then fourth vaccine jabs began to be widely administered in higher-income countries in 2021 and 2022, before even 20% of the population of low-income countries, including most of Africa, had received a single jab. By May 2021, access to the vaccine was so dramatically disparate – and proportional to countries’ income levels – that the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, referred to the situation as ‘vaccine apartheid’
13. “COVID-19 vaccine apartheid and the failure of global cooperation,” Stephen Brown and Morgane Rosier. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations Vol. 25(3):535–554 (2023). DOI: 10.1177/13691481231178248
There was now one system, with no real rules, for rich countries, and one system with rules that produced little benefit for the poor. In this, it reproduced the pattern created by capitalist colonialism and neocolonialism: an equitable course was sacrificed as the most powerful state actors used their power to hoard resources, leaving others to their own devices.
In fact, the people with power over wealthy countries didn't just undermine foreigners, they also sacrificed their own people's long-term health. Failing to vaccinate a large part of the global population living in low-income countries created the opportunity for the virus to find safe havens in which it could mutate into new forms and then spread right back to the wealthy countries. Inevitably, some of those mutated strains—like Omicron—would prove resistent to existing vaccines, requiring yet more scrambling for effective vaccines.
All of this was predictable and predicted, making it hard to imagine that it was done as some kind of oopsie by leaders, who must have known what would come. They were certainly warned, and anyone with a minimal knowledge of microbiology would have had to actively work at not seeing it coming.
In the 71st session of the Regional Committee for Europe [in 2021], Dr. Tedros A. Ghebreyesus, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), pointed out that ‘the longer vaccine inequity persists, the more opportunity the virus has to circulate and change into variants that could potentially evade vaccines’. The recent global outbreak of Omicron is exactly what Dr. Tedros feared. Therefore, the quickest way out of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is to inoculate the most vulnerable people in all countries while aiming to contain the virus and preventing it from changing into more transmissible variants.
14. “Vaccine apartheid: the separation of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable and the birth of Omicron,” Prasad et al. Therapeutic advances in vaccines and immunotherapy, Vol. 10: 1–5 (2022). DOI: 10.1177/25151355221107975
But that's ok! Because by that time the benefits of apartheid had been harvested: voters who would have remembered a vaccine “shortage,” consisting of equitable distribution without the hoarding of a massive “safety margin”(because out-of-power duopoly parties, anxious for their turn at the trough, would have incessantly reminded them) instead forgot the issue, and corporate profits had been made (with a new round on the way from the new vaccines).
6. Real-World Planning III: Environmental Time-Lines
With Covid, an effective plan would have interfered with our capitalist economy only temporarily, by requiring that people stay isolated at home long enough that transmission would no longer be an issue.
In the case of climate change and the other environmental problems bearing down on us, the only effective plan is one that’s long-term, possibly permanent, and is designed specifically to limit capitalism’s freedom or even to effectively end it as the dominant economic system in the world.
The people who’ve become rich and powerful as a result of the current system aren’t going to like that, in both the public and private spheres, and they have hugely disproportionate control over economic and political affairs and the organized use of force through private security, police, regional and national guards, and national militaries. We’ve seen how they’ve reacted to disruptions like the uprising after George Floyd was killed and the challenge to key elements of the current world system like the persistence of Palestinian resistance and the domestic movements that support it.
If they couldn’t handle temporarily interrupting their profits in order to save millions of lives from Covid—even lives in their own countries—how will they feel about permanently limiting or eliminating the “freedom” to make profits?
If they can’t deal with anti-racism and anti-colonialism without resorting to forceful overkill, how will they deal with an overall, deeply fundamental challenge?
That doesn’t mean our task is impossible, but it does clearly show us its scale.
Dr. Gilmour’s Twitter thread:
