At this year’s State of the Union, Joe Biden had a narrative to sell the people of the U.S. Empire: According to Biden’s story, when he entered office, the economy was reeling, but now, under his tenure as President, the economy is on the mend, with millions of new jobs “created” in the last two years, and unemployment at historic lows — nevermind the ongoing housing and cost-of-living crisis, the continual depression of wages, a crisis of overproduction and waste, and an impending financial crash. According to Biden, the COVID-19 pandemic is over; in Biden’s story, COVID-19 isn’t still killing thousands of people every week, while the Biden regime stands by, condemning those thousands to death. According to Biden, “our democracy remains unbowed and unbroken” two years after Trump’s attempted coup d’état of January 6th, 2021 — nevermind that basic human, civil, and democratic rights for women, LGBT people, and Black people are under assault in courts and legislatures and police departments at every level of government across the U.S. Empire. According to Biden, his administration has “defended a stronger and safer Europe” by funneling billions of dollars in arms to Ukraine’s fascist Zelenskyy regime, to fuel the ongoing proxy-war between NATO and the Russian Federation.

As we will see, Biden’s narrative is a simple one: consolidation. Although the regime toyed with, for example, undermining the right-fascist capture of the Supreme Court by adding new, left-leaning justices through a planned expansion of the court by adding new, left-leaning justices, that plan was never really on the table. Biden allowed it to be leaked to the press, publicly announced he was considering it, and even went so far as to appoint a commission to study the subject. Instead, we have a morass of half-measures designed to stabilize the dangerously out-of-kilter economy and social environment into a new equilibrium, one that is substantially rightward of where it stood in January of 2016. That is the actual function and outcome of the Democratic strategy of “compromise.” Above all, this State of the Union Address is an effort to rally the fractious and divided masters of the country, to get them all on the same page, to restore the shaken stability of capitalist class-rule in the face of increased labor agitation and rising consciousness of governmental misdeeds.

And who does Biden look forward to compromising with? His State of the Union begins with an effusive congratulations to GOP Senator Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy was one of the most vocal defenders of the now-disgraced Trump regime. He voted to strip $500 million from abortion funding. He voted against the house resolution to condemn racism against Asians because he believed the COVID-19 virus was created by or in China. He was part of the planned legislative assault on LGBT people and supported the so-called Defense of Marriage Act to deny legal recognition to same-sex couples — indeed, went so far as to join in a legal brief to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of that heinous act. 

As Biden said: Congratulations, Mr. McCarthy! 

Already, media conglomerate Comcast, through one of its many media arms, MSNBC, has already begun casting the State of the Union as a triumph, and Biden’s recognition of shared class interest with his Republican siblings as “savvy” and “quick-witted.” Thus, should the GOP-fraction come to an agreement with the Democrat-fraction, Biden’s regime will be able to say that they engineered this unity. Should they fight, the words of unity will be cast either as sarcastic and biting or as a heartfelt plea that was snubbed by childish Republicans. Fundamentally, this introduction was an effort at bridge-building, at reminding the GOP (or at least its center and left wing) that the real interests of the ruling class are shared interests.

The new House Minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, delivered high praise by Biden during the speech is, of course, a member of the Clintonite New Democrat Coalition — a caucus within the Democratic Party that brought Bill Clinton to power in the 1990s and saw the wholesale dismantling of economic regulation in the private sector, the passage of anti-Black “anti-crime” bills during the Clinton period, of which Biden was himself a prominent partisan crusader in the Senate — and that collectively joined the GOP as a Democratic voting block just last week to pass the atrocious, a-historical, reactionary  resolution “Denouncing the horrors of socialism.”

The typical response from the professional mainstream media pundits and “analysts,” who turn public dissection of ruling-class discourse into a hobby and a sport, to this kind of in-club back-slapping and glad-handing is that  “compromise” is necessary for advancing any agenda in  the U.S. political arena. This obsession of the Democratic Party with unity between the center-left and the center-right serves as a convenient shield for ruling-class ambitions. This broader attitude is merely the wide application of that principle: the unity of the interest of the ruling class. Compromise is based on shared goals. It cannot be achieved by enemies unless they share interests; the interests shared by Biden and the Republicans (up to, but not including, the most extreme-right, which we will address further on) are the basic interests of the ruling class. All Republicans and Democrats share these interests in common, and Biden will carefully and specifically spell out those things they share throughout the course of this speech. This is ruling class language at its finest, even though Biden has barely said anything yet.

Throughout his entire speech, Biden referred to Americans as a nationality, as a “nation.” This is common in U.S. discourse, but why does that matter — in other words, why point that out? In actuality, the U.S. isn’t a single nation, nor is there any “American people.” The U.S. is a settler-colonial empire, a grand prison-house of nations, a vast expanse of stolen land, in which many Indigenous nations are subjugated, oppressed, and hyper-exploited, either as colonies or semi-colonies. 

This idea of the “melting pot” became a shibboleth after the First World War to encourage the complete assimilation of most European and some Asian immigrants (although not, at that time, the former slaves of New Africa, or this continent’s Indigenous peoples, or newer Black and brown migrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, or various “undesirables”) into the white Anglo-American “nation”. This “American” white nationalism was supported by no less prolific a fascist as Henry Ford, who founded the English School in 1914 for just this purpose — that is, to transform his immigrant workers into “true Americans.” Ford’s graduation ceremony saw his workers step off a symbolic immigrant ship, pass through a melting pot, discarding their “ethnic” clothing — the last vestiges of the lands, cultures, and languages they left behind, and end their “transformation” dressed in identical suits, waving American flags.

But why this lie? Why is this American melting pot imagery deployed here by Biden? Because the Democratic strategy relies on class-collaboration not only between the white working class, the white petit-bourgeoisie, and the ruling capitalists, but also between the nationally oppressed peoples. How often have we heard that, for instance, Black voters overwhelmingly vote Democrat? Here, in a few swift and well-calculated words, Black Americans — New Africans — are stripped of their nation and join the hundreds of Indigenous peoples, the subject and exploited Puerto Ricans, the captured Chicanx, and the many many refugees fleeing U.S. imperialist violence who were drawn to the stability at the eye of the world-wide storm of U.S. murder; and all of these groups are erased to become simply “Americans.”

The lie of a unified America stands in direct contrast to reality, to the actual, economic truth in the U.S. The different nations imprisoned within the U.S. Empire are subject to intense economic exploitation by the Anglo-American capitalists. Black property is stolen every day, Black lives destroyed for the benefit of white financiers, and the same goes for Latine and Indigenous lives and property. Pretending everyone living within the borders of the empire is part of the same nation is only one of many ways of saying that everyone living here is equal before the law — the biggest lie of all.

Much of Biden’s speech was occupied with hammering on the apparent achievements of his administration in triumphing over COVID, restoring the economy, etc. But COVID is not over, despite the pronouncements of regime propagandists and Biden himself. Even the opponents of the Biden administration pretend the disease has been “defeated” or was never that big of a problem to begin with. Nothing could be further from the truth. Thousands die each week from complications related to the pandemic. Many thousands more are permanently damaged or disabled by the disease. The virus continues to mutate and change so rapidly that the new variants are no longer named, merely given identifying combinations of letters and numbers. Because the capitalist state refuses to take the necessary measures to put an end to the pandemic, it not only continues on, but threatens to break out anew in ever-more deadly and virulent forms.

The capitalist economy is on anything but firm footing. It hasn’t recovered from COVID; in fact, it’s been demonstrably rotten since the 2008 financial crisis. Economists (who are themselves presently all combinations of capitalist propagandist and diviner in some degree or another) grew used to the prevailing post-2008 conditions of the financial markets, in particular a persistent near-0% federal funds rate. From 2008 to 2020, the federal funds rate was kept below 2.5% to make credit easy to come by, and to stimulate investment in risky business prospects. Prior to that 2008 crisis, the federal funds rate floated between 2% and 6% at any given time.

The COVID crisis, which necessitated the shutdown of most elements of the cycle of production to be even partially contained, has exposed the rot at the core of the U.S. financial markets. Only through massive quantitative easing (the buyback of government bonds using freely-extended credit from the Federal Reserve to pump new money, in the form of credit, into the bank and investment spheres), the removal of the overnight bank funding rate, the lifting of the bank reserve requirement (meaning they do not have to keep sufficient cash on hand to cover any given withdrawal), and the termination of most financial regulations kept the U.S. market afloat during the all-too-brief shutdown. The result is that, of all circulating U.S. currency today, 2/3rds of it was created within the last 2 years.

This massive increase to the money supply has gone entirely to the super-wealthy and their investment agencies like Blackrock. The result has been an inflationary spiral. More currency in circulation without a rise in the number of commodities also circulating means prices must go up.

We’ve seen efforts to contain this financial disaster in the sudden and precipitous raising of the federal funds rate by the Federal Reserve. This rate shows no sign of slowing down, and has been raised at every subsequent Federal Reserve meeting for the past year. The current rate is 4.5%, the highest it’s been since October 31, 2007.

The historical unity of the ruling class is realized in the state. Biden then moves on to celebrate shared victories achieved by a combination of Democrats and Republicans. So what issues are the Biden regime proud of “coming together” on? The first is the safety of Europe, or in other words, the nearly-decade long assault on the freedom and security of the Ukrainian and Russian people. Never to look a gift horse in the mouth, the Biden regime and its predecessors not only managed to install a Banderite-fascist government in Kiev, it has also attacked its own allies in Germany and France, forcing their peoples into ruinous de-industrialization by switching from Russian oil to good old U.S. liquified petroleum gas.

The other things of which he claimed to be proud are the Electoral Count Reform Act, the Respect for Marriage Act, and the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.

The Electoral Count Reform Act is an update of an 1887 law that adds safeguards against elector fraud during the presidential election; it does nothing to address the growing threat of right-fascist capture of the executive office. It merely clarifies obscure procedural details and ensures the vice president has no say in the outcome of a presidential election. Having been secure in their power for over 200 years, the U.S. politician is a great believer in procedure. Procedural niceties make the politician comfortable, assure them that all is well, even when their settler-empire is collapsing around their ears. Never mind, no, never mind that the Electoral College itself is the embodiment of the white supremacist demands of slavers, and today embodies bourgeois class-supremacy. Never mind that! We only need to fix down the right procedure for making it fair.

The cowardly vacillation in the face of the impending court-driven crisis that threatens the marriages and the legal marriageability of millions of gay and lesbian couples as well as so-called inter-racial couples by the Democrats and Biden himself was resolved with the totally unsatisfactory Respect for Marriage Act. Rather than enshrining the legal right for all sexuality and nationally oppressed couples to marry in every state in the United States, the act merely ensures that if and when the Supreme Court overturns its landmark Obergefell case — which the court has signaled is only a matter of time — the majority of states that do not recognize gay and lesbian marriages will be required to recognize any that are contracted in states that do. 

The Violence Against Women Act, despite its progressive wording (although its name is curiously lacking any words indicating that it’s meant to stop violence) is actually a vehicle through which the Congress grants $225 million to police and courts to more stringently enforce existing laws. It should not be forgotten that the single demographic most likely to engage in domestic violence are the very police officers the act gives extra funding. The latest renewal of the act extends its “protections” into Indigenous communities that, under Biden’s watch, have had their sovereignty in law enforcement stripped from them by the right-fascist Supreme Court.

Above all, Biden sounded that old fascist drumbeat, the reveille of white-supremacist America. The threat of the “good jobs” going abroad to Asia leaving, as Biden and his fascist coreligionists frame it, a denuded and feeble economy of service jobs. But if there are two words that have always gone together in fascist jargon, they are nation and race. Biden does not here say the word race, but it can be read into the American nation; what is the American nation, in the eyes of the president of the United States? Not the men and women disproportionately jailed by the police, but the white businessmen and defense contractors, snug in their walled compounds of suburbia.

The “problem” with production in the U.S. Empire isn’t that the manufacturing jobs have moved abroad. The loss of intermediate manufacturing (that is, transforming raw materials not into finished products but into the commodities that themselves will be used to create the finished products) isn’t a flaw in the imperialist system. It is the outcome of a century of the profit motive grinding against the power of organized labor in the imperialist West.

No imperialist politician can afford to explain this connection, because it would immediately give the lie to all of their social safety net talk. We should be explicit! Intermediate and even some finished manufacturing jobs have moved overseas because the wages required to hire laborers in the U.S. are too high to maintain the rate of profit the capitalist owners have come to expect — to demand. In exchange for cheap commodities manufactured abroad, there has been a kind of unwritten agreement between the business leaders and white labor. You get cheap phones, cars, refrigerators, electricity, and the cushiest high-end technical jobs are reserved for you here in the U.S. Empire. In exchange, the capitalists get to reap the benefits of labor arbitrage between the low cost of labor in the imperialized periphery (one of the reasons the U.S. keeps bombing these countries is to keep the cost of living, and therefore wages, low).

All throughout the 1990s, the Democrats official position was that this process was actually good. They used coded terms like “technological jobs” and “technological advantage” and told the entire U.S. population that all we had to do was “learn to code” and the United States Empire would reign over the global economy as a country of managers, technicians, and bureaucrats. It’s only now that the network of exploitation underlying the imperialist lifestyle is showing its cracks, only now that the truth is indisputable, only now that we are remembering that even in a country of managers, technicians, and bureaucrats with all of its basic industry exported to the poorest sectors of the world, that there will still have to be a construction industry, a transport industry, a personal service industry, that the Democrats have desperately begun trying to recapture the loyalty of manufacturing workers.

This is what the Democrat pundits mean when they say that Biden is the most labor-friendly president since FDR: when bourgeois politicians say “labor friendly,” they don’t mean that they will vindicate labor agitation in the face of the owning class, they mean that they will help “stimulate” the economy such that more people will be hired. Biden hits this theme over and over again, and in reality it’s no different from the GOP rhetoric about “job creators.”

Biden made a laughable claim that inflation was “coming down.” Inflation, in fact, is not “coming down.” The Consumer Price Index, that is the price of a basket of common consumer items used to estimate overall inflation, has been climbing steadily since the economy reopened after the all-too-brief COVID shutdown in 2020. Perhaps what Biden’s speechwriters meant, in typical political-speak (read: lies) was that the speed of inflation was slowing. A car traveling at 100 miles-per-hour that gains 20 miles-per-hour in the first minute (to reach a speed of 120 mph), 10 miles-per-hour in the second minute (to reach a speed of 130 mph), and 5 miles-per-hour in the third minute (you guessed it, 135 mph) isn’t slowing down. It’s a fatal accident waiting to happen.

The administration is sensitive to the economic crisis that is building within both the financial markets and the consumer markets. That’s why Biden went on to tout his regime’s plan to strengthen the domestic technology economy with ludicrous statements about microchip and semiconductor manufacturing (although you wouldn’t be able to tell, listening to Professor Biden, that there was a difference between a microchip — an integrated circuit composed of semiconductors linked together — and a semiconductor — a material that has specific electrical properties and which makes up the components of a microchip).

Despite lying about the pace of inflation, the president then had to specifically identify the manufacturing crisis that’s leading to the inflation in the price of all commodities that make use of microchips. In the Western imperialist centers, and particularly in the U.S. Empire where excess is a way of life, everything contains microchips, because almost every commodity has a computer installed in it.

But Biden’s speechwriters were once again thinking of more than just the average worker when they wrote this passage. It’s also a message to Biden’s fellow Democratic warmongers and Western-based microchip manufacturers that the slowly boiling trade war with the People’s Republic of China is heating up. We can never let this happen again, Biden said — meaning, the rise in prices that resulted from trade sanctions against the People’s Republic microchip sector. For Biden, microchip manufacturing can be used to sound like he’s restoring the old Democratic contract with labor while also signaling his intent to pursue economic independence from the People’s Republic; together with  his other policies it’s clear why: the Democrats foresee increased economic warfare against China and the non-aligned bloc it represents.

Nevermind that semiconductor manufacturing threatens to collapse an already overburdened water supply system in the U.S. Nevermind that part of the rise in prices of semiconductors is directly attributable to the ill-planned visits of U.S. lawmakers to the island of Taiwan in violation of U.S. treaty obligations with the People’s Republic and subsequent sanctions from the People’s Republic in retaliation prohibiting the manufacturers on Taiwan from importing the all-important quartz sand necessary for their production.

And what role have Biden and the Democratic Party played in combating environmental degradation? More oil and gas drilling approvals than under Trump. Going ahead with the ConocoPhillips plan to drill in Alaska. In fact, far from “tackling the climate crisis,” the Inflation Reduction Act requires the federal government to lease 60 million acres of federal land for fossil fuel extraction every year, which will continue to expand the disastrous emission of greenhouse gasses. And, most horrifically and most recently, the Biden government has caused the worst-ever ecological crisis in United States history.

In the Biden government’s efforts to, one supposes, retain the image of most labor-friendly president since FDR, Biden himself crushed a rail strike last year. Many of the demands of the near-striking rail workers went directly to the safety of the country’s many trains: longer hours, no leave time, no sick time, fewer workers, and fewer safety precautions have resulted in the terrifying derailment of a train carrying vinyl chloride. As a result, Ohio is now filled with toxic phosgene gas and other fumes, the groundwater has been poisoned, and a noxious pillar of black smoke is now rising from the ruined train.

Part of the plan of stabilization and consolidation is the punishment of the most flagrant exploiters, those who are the most exposed in the eyes of the public for gouging the working masses. This was Biden’s next talking point. But, this selective punishment is not out of goodwill or empathetic concern for working people. It is a feature of any system of exploitation that, when its excesses become too egregious, fall too much outside of the accepted norms, that where even other exploiters take notice and wrinkle their noses, the system itself as the representative of the corporate, collective power of the ruling classes takes action to curb them. Too naked a pattern of exploitation, too obvious and flagrant a system of abuse, and it threatens to expose the injustices that are the basis upon which society is founded. That’s what Biden is expressing here, although he’s claiming that “capitalism without competition is not capitalism” as his cover.

In fact, the steady suppression of competition is one of the key features of capitalism. This process is called concentration of production and capital. It is the tendency of competition to drive smaller capitalists out of business, to have their factories, shopfronts, and what-not bought up by the bigger capitalists. As technological breakthroughs in more and more efficient machines mean that any new capitalists have to put up more and more starting capital, small capitalists are barred from competing because they simply can’t scrape together enough money to buy the latest lathe or die-stamping tool.

Competition produces concentration, and in this way, destroys the conditions of competition themselves. Biden is talking like a capitalist of the 19th century — or, perhaps even more accurately, like a fascist of the early 20th century. Let’s look at another speech: “We no longer have the struggle for life, free competition, the selection of the fittest. We note the first symptoms of fatigue and deviation in the capitalistic world. The era of cartels, syndicates, combines, and trusts now begins….The end of free competition…. The very law of supply and demand is no longer a dogma, for cartels and trusts make it possible to influence both supply and demand.” That eerily similar sentiment comes not from our friend Mr. Biden, but from his early 20th-century counterpart, Mr. Mussolini.

There was another topic that he could not avoid: the increase of violence on the part of the U.S. capitalist police state. In one breath during his speech, Biden pretended to care about the rampant abuse and murder of his capitalist police, and then applauded more stringent laws that will enable the police to abuse and murder untold thousands. Gun control is the dialectical compliment of the settler police force, but a Democrat like Biden cannot or will not draw the connection.

In fact, in 1994 then-senator Biden worked with some of the most vile open segregationists remaining in the United States government to pass legislation eerily similar to the 1960s gun control legislation of California, passed to prevent Black Panthers from arming their cop-watch patrols. In fact, what Biden said then, in 1994, wasn’t that he was trying to find common-sense gun control. What he said was “Every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic senator from the State of Delaware: Joe Biden.” That same year he compared himself to Richard Nixon. “Every time Richard Nixon, when he was running in 1972, would say, ‘Law and order,’ the Democratic match or response was, ‘Law and order with justice’ — whatever that meant. And I would say, ‘Lock the S.O.B.s up.’”

Lock the S.O.B.s up. That’s the true face of U.S. gun control policy, and the true face of Joseph Robinette Biden.

He also launched a plan to engage in a crusade against fentanyl. This isn’t even simple consolidation of the right-ward shift of the country, it is an intensification of the white terror. Biden’s fentanyl crusade is creating the very problem it pretends to be combatting. It’s well known that once the ban on the sale of alcohol was a fait accomplis in the early 20th century that many politicians in the U.S. prepared to reap the rewards by establishing what were in essence large criminal production networks. It will come as no surprise in 50 years when it is revealed that the politicians by and large responsible for the War on Drugs are shown to have been among its primary beneficiaries.

If you weren’t yet totally exhausted by Biden’s fascistic talking points, he followed this up with plans for closing the borders to “unwanted migration” from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, New border plans? What do they include? Biden himself tells us: more money for the fascist border patrols. These border police even went so far as to brutalize immigrants ahead of Biden’s own visit to El Paso, Texas, in order to make the president look better when he arrived. What words did the president and top Democrat just recently use toward those at the border? That’s right, “Do not show up here.”

What about the rest of this criminally negligent speech? The lies contained within it have mostly been addressed by points above, and are so self-evidently false that they require no reproduction by us to demonstrate it. More hot air about fentanyl and the drug war, false promises about curing cancer, and bloviating about the “peaceful” role of NATO in provoking the Russian-Ukraine war, followed by the same “we’re all in this together” pablum peddled by the addle-pated Biden at every campaign rally he’s ever been to, and interspersed throughout every speech he’s ever given.

The most important thing to listen to is the flag-waving surrounding what he cast as the defeat of the January 6th Movement — the petit-bourgeois putsch attempt that stormed the capitol building in Washington, D.C., and could have installed a second Trump administration if its organizers had any idea how successful it was going to be. Biden’s disdain for the putschists is a signal to the remainder of the GOP, and it tells us everything about what he plans to do domestically. His administration’s plan is a clumsy attempt to split the far-right fascists from the right fascists in the GOP and transform the center (straddling both sides of the aisle) into a bloc capable of resisting the right and the moderate left. In other words, Biden is attempting to shore up the crumbling status quo position at the center of government.

In foreign policy, the entire State of the Union is a declaration of war: war on the Russian Federation, which he intends to escalate (and indeed, in the week since giving the speech has already begun escalating) and war, eventually on the People’s Republic of China, which he signaled over and over again with his talk of the United States Empire standing on its own two feet and relying on no one.

So, we have our outline for the final period of the Biden presidency: war, on every front; with enemies foreign and domestic, and between the ruling class and the working classes but with a concomitant peace: peace between the fractious and rebellious groups within the bourgeois ruling class, so they can present a united front. Well, let him draw his sword. We are forging ours.

“When one individual inflicts injury upon another such that death results, we call that manslaughter. When society places hundreds in a position that they inevitably meet early & unnatural death … its deed is murder just as the individual.”

Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England

We have been betrayed. For three years, we have been abandoned, misled, shepherded to our dooms. Millions have died. Hundreds of millions have been disabled. All the while, respectable faces with plastered-on grins breathlessly offer hopeful platitudes, assuring us we’ll all be ok. Just trust the system.

You could be forgiven for not realizing we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, considering the total absence of media coverage. If it was important, you’d surely be hearing about it, right? The last variant you heard about was likely omicron. The last you heard about vaccines was likely “we strongly encourage everyone to get boosted.” The last you heard about masks was that they work, but they’re not required. And why would you bother wearing masks anyway if, as the United States president himself proclaimed, “The pandemic is over”?

Here’s the truth: the pandemic is not over. It’s much worse than you have been led to believe. And unless you’ve spent the past several years reading scientific studies on the subject, it can be hard to convey just how wrong the public perception of COVID really is. Everything from how it’s spread, to how it’s prevented, to what it does once it’s in your body, is being tragically misunderstood.

None of this is an accident. It’s not your “fault” if you aren’t a virologist, immunologist, epidemiologist, or evolutionary biologist. It’s the job of experts and trusted voices to convey the truth and give you guidance. Not only have they failed at this, they have engaged in an active disinformation campaign dedicated to making the pandemic “disappear”. This has not been the result of a classic caricature of conspiracy — some tiny council of elites, gathered in the shadows to craft policy out of whole cloth. What we’re actually witnessing is the quiet collusion of class interest. This form of conspiracy is a feature of cultural hegemony, and it has aligned itself in direct opposition to public health and scientific reality. A “conspiracy” of this sort takes place in full view of the public. Every actor within it has openly telegraphed motivations that we are all taught to see as acceptable: keeping the current economic system intact at all costs.

From the moment humanity learned of the novel coronavirus, uncertainty swirled. SARS-CoV-2, named for its terrifying viral cousin, seemed to be even worse than SARS: more deadly, more transmissible, better at evading detection. A singular question arose in the minds of two very different classes of people: “How do we survive this?” For one of those classes, the question was literal: how do we avoid being killed by a disease that seems to be spreading and killing invisibly and indiscriminately? For the other class, the question being asked in boardrooms and capitols was really: “Could this dislodge our grip on power?”

For infectious disease experts, the emergence of an unknown human pathogen — quickly identified as a novel virus — necessitated a pretty clear course of action: contain it, characterize it, and share information as freely as possible. Days after the first cluster of cases were found in Wuhan, Chinese health authorities issued a warning to the WHO. The full genome of the virus that would come to be called SARS-CoV-2 was released to the world before it was even documented outside of China. Coronavirus labs around the world began mobilizing rapidly to study the virus, including creating synthetic versions to study in cultured mammalian cells to learn as much as possible about its life cycle and pathogenicity. 

Why did experts mobilize so quickly, even before human-to-human transmission was conclusively proven? The primary reason is the precautionary principle: when dealing with an unknown, if you don’t know conclusively that it isn’t dangerous, presume the worst case scenario and take the proper precautions. If that wasn’t enough of a reason, researchers figured out pretty quickly that this was a relative of SARS, which has caused enough mayhem on its own to warrant every measure possible to avoid a repeat tragedy. This principle was particularly upheld in China, which had borne the brunt of the SARS crisis, but true precaution never truly materialized in the capitalist world.

After a brief experiment in precautionary measures (stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, quarantine guidelines) many countries in the West quickly saw the writing on the wall — these precautions were not sufficient to stamp out the emerging pandemic. There were measures that could have stopped the virus in its tracks: contact tracing (testing every single person who was in the vicinity of a potential case), enforced quarantines combined with guaranteed paid time off for even the hint of exposure, mandating fitted respirators (and distributing multiple N95s to every resident). But these measures would have required central governments to nationalize key industries, companies to pay employees not to work, and individuals to get comfortable with some discomfort in the name of social welfare (although many already were). These measures would have been a tremendous imposition on the free market, and even then, there was no guarantee they would completely eradicate SARS-CoV-2.

Even half measures, like local mask mandates, were better than nothing, and they did keep many people safe in the beginning. But despite them being utterly insufficient in the face of the crisis we were thrust into, they were still too much for the capitalists to tolerate. They were “harming the economy” by impeding production and discouraging consumption. Tiny protests, led by business owners demanding an end to “restrictions,” garnered massive media attention. Less than 2 months after their implementation, stay-at-home orders were already on their way out, even as cases continued to rapidly climb. Injected into every news story about the pandemic was a consideration for the malaise of the capitalists, whose economic ruin would surely spell the end of our society. The drive to “end the pandemic” began almost as soon as the pandemic arrived in the U.S.

The Lies and the Truth

Near the beginning of the pandemic, you may have heard a common refrain from public health sources: if we address the situation properly, it’ll look like we overreacted. And yet, by the time community transmission started ramping up in the U.S. in March 2020, we had already failed to “overreact.” The consensus had already come in from the highest levels: at all costs, do NOT start a panic. World leaders at the time, including the U.S.’s Donald Trump, the U.K.’s Boris Johnson, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, and Italy’s Giuseppe Conte, all spent the first few months of 2020 exhorting the public not to “give in to fear.” Following precipitous stock market crashes in February and March of 2020, every market analysis firm reported on the tremendous financial damage being done by “coronavirus concerns.” The overwhelming narrative in the early days was that fear of the virus would be worse than the disease it causes. This philosophy manifested in several ways, including outright lies that still haunt us to this day, driving misinformed “personal risk assessments” among the population, including:

• Masks don’t work.
• Masks do work, but cloth masks are fine.
• Stop the spread by washing hands, standing 6 feet apart, and sanitizing surfaces.
• COVID is not airborne
• COVID is airborne, but that’s not the main way it spreads.
• The only people harmed by COVID are old and immunocompromised people.
• Children don’t get COVID.
• Children can get COVID, but they can’t spread it.
• Reinfections are rare.
• Breakthrough infections after vaccination are rare.
• Reinfections and breakthrough infections happen, but they’re mild.
• Once enough people have been exposed, herd immunity will end the pandemic.
• Viruses naturally evolve to become less deadly.
• Once you recover from acute infection, you’re out of the woods.
• Long COVID is psychological, not physical.
• Long COVID is physical, but not a big concern.
• Heightened lethality of non-COVID diseases is due to “immunity debt.”

The list of officially-sanctioned lies could potentially go on for pages. The most critical feature of the misinformation is that it is always centered around that same core philosophy of minimization. That trend continued to evolve throughout the pandemic: whether it’s Anthony Fauci admitting that he discouraged masks because he didn’t want to trigger panic-buying, the CDC shifting its metrics from transmission levels to “community levels” in soothing pastel colors, school districts touting their supposed low transmission rates, or any of the other examples of public health malpractice, everything has been geared toward pushing people to underestimate danger rather than overestimate. This pattern has continued to this day, with officials attempting to head off panic in the face of the extremely infectious and immune-evasive XBB.1.5 variant (colloquially referred to as the “Kraken” variant).

Before going further, let’s clarify what that danger actually is. Because of how complex biological systems are, it is difficult to convey all the nuance of a viral pandemic without getting too technical. Nevertheless, we can make some pretty clear assertions, based on condensing hundreds of scientific studies into a few paragraphs. With that in mind, here’s everything you need to know about COVID-19 and the virus that causes it:

COVID is airborne. Airborne transmission is different from droplets, which are large particles containing the virus, expelled when you speak, cough, sneeze, etc. Droplets are heavy enough that they will eventually drop to the ground or nearby surfaces, meaning it’s relatively easy to contain: any physical barrier — like a cloth mask or plexiglass — will block these droplets before they can reach another person. “Social distancing” is a concept that applies to droplet transmission, under the presumption that the virus-containing droplets will fall to the ground before reaching someone 6 feet away. Sanitizing surfaces kills any viral droplets that have landed on them before someone can touch them and then touch their orifices.

However, COVID is not confined to droplets. We have known for years that it can spread through aerosol as papers published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Emerging Infectious Diseases, and Risk Analysis demonstrate going back to 2020. Aerosol is composed of much smaller particles that bounce around between air particles, and can stay suspended and infectious in the air. Picture someone smoking: the behavior of the smoke is much more akin to the behavior of viral aerosols. Can you still smell the smoke behind a plexiglass shield? How about if you’re six feet apart? In a crowded, enclosed space, how many people would breathe in the smoke of one smoker? Measures designed to protect against droplets aren’t exactly pointless against COVID, since it also spreads via droplets. But just because you’re not spewing COVID-laden spittle in someone’s face does not mean you’re keeping your germs to yourself.

You can get COVID over and over. The idea that you become immune to COVID after getting infected or vaccinated is based on the concept of immune memory. Every time a pathogen enters your body (either through infection or vaccination), your immune system mounts a defense to stop it: first a broad “kill anything that moves” phase we call innate immunity, then a phase of adaptive immunity, which is targeted to kill the specific thing that triggered the immune response. Pieces of the invader are used to create, recruit, and activate a variety of immune components — including antibodies, T cells, and B cells — that are trained to recognize that specific pathogen. Some cells of the immune system, called memory cells, are kept around from that second stage as a sort of permanent record. If the exact same pathogen shows up again, the immune system already knows what to look for. This is the key behind vaccination: expose your immune system to a harmless piece of the virus, and it’ll remember it when it encounters the real thing.

Except this isn’t even close to the whole story. For one thing, the snapshot stored in your immune memory is just a physical piece of the pathogen, and viruses evolve very quickly. As the virus changes, the real thing starts to resemble the record being kept by your immune system less and less, and it becomes easier and easier for new variants to evade adaptive immunity. The more people that get infected, the more times the virus randomly mutates — and the more likely it is that a particular combination of those mutations makes a virus that is unrecognizable to your immune system. For a while, the WHO used to categorize these mutants as “variants of concern,” giving them each a new name. When the virus mutated enough to evade the immunity to the wild-type virus, they named it alpha. The lineage that was able to evade alpha was called beta. Delta was particularly immune evasive and its mutations brought high levels of lethality. Omicron was so different from all existing strains that it was practically able to infect everyone, no matter when they got infected and/or vaccinated. And then… they stopped giving the variants names. “Omicron” is still used to describe every descendant of that original variant, despite the dozens of highly-infectious, highly dangerous variants circulating today, none of which look enough like omicron itself for your immune system to efficiently recognize them.

COVID screws with your immune system. Upon infection, SARS-CoV-2 immediately gets to work suppressing attempts to stop it. It hijacks your cells’ machinery to shut down production of crucial immune system alarms. This includes the component used to present pieces of the virus on the surface of the cell to tell the immune system “Hey! This cell is infected, and here’s the culprit!” This component is necessary for specific immune cells to identify the target and proceed with the adaptive immune response, leading to both delayed innate and adaptive immune response.

When immune cells arrive on the scene, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is able to infect them as well. Monocytes, which are involved in ushering in the adaptive immune response, get infected by SARS-CoV-2, and are reprogrammed to prevent them from presenting antigens and teaching the adaptive immune system what to look for. T cells rush to become cell killers, causing the signature massive tissue damage that can be fatal in severe cases. Every infection depletes your body’s reserve of naïve T cells — that pool of “blank” immune cells your body keeps on hand for later deployment and specialization — damaging your ability to mount an effective immune response to future infections — including other pathogens. This is why, no matter how many people get infected or vaccinated, we have not — and will not — reach “herd immunity.” Naïve T cells are also necessary for stopping the cell-killing activity of activated T cells, which is a factor in the severity of acute COVID. Worse still, the population is steadily becoming more vulnerable to infections of all types. We are in the middle of an alarming surge of diseases beyond just COVID: RSV, influenza, strep A, and many others are hospitalizing people in record numbers — opportunistic infections, handed the gift of a softened-up population of victims.

For a while, vaccines were highly effective against severe acute infections — not because they prevented infection or created lasting immunity, but because they prompted your body to create antibodies to the virus, which can persist in your blood for months. If you got infected while these antibodies were present, it helped your immune system compensate for the virus’s suppression of adaptive immunity. Your immune response was less likely to go haywire, cause massive tissue damage, and lead to severe clinical outcomes. However, by the time boosters became available, the vaccines were already obsolete: they were engineered to target the original version of the virus, which you were already unlikely to ever see again.

COVID evolves rapidly. An idea has been floating around for years that SARS-CoV-2 will naturally reach an “evolutionary ceiling,” where it can no longer adapt around our immune systems, and will become no more pathogenic than a cold. This is predicated on a misunderstanding of evolutionary and viral dynamics. The main factors guiding the evolution of the virus are: how well it can spread from person-to-person, how well it can infect cells, and how well it can evade the immune system. This latter factor is the most crucial since, as previously noted, the virus’s effect on the immune system is a significant driver of its danger. The idea of an evolutionary ceiling stems from the notion that, in order to adapt around our immune system, the virus needs to change, and those changes necessarily impact its other features — namely its ability to spread and infect. But this is not the case.

As the virus spreads, it racks up mutations. Every new host gives the virus trillions of opportunities to mutate before sending it on to the next victim. By the time SARS-CoV-2 first took over the world, it had already diverged so thoroughly into separate lineages, giving rise to variants like alpha, beta, delta, and omicron. The Omicron lineage eventually emerged with another profoundly unique and highly-infectious set of mutations, and followed the same pattern. In its wake, it left behind many more child lineages, each distinct enough from each other to create a “variant cloud.” For months, the various omicron sublineages have been unable to outcompete each other, because none has had a set of adaptations so exceptionally advantageous as to outstrip the spread of the others. However, as the mutations continue to accumulate across all lineages, it’s only a matter of time before a new mega-variant emerges. It will sweep across the population, again diverging as it goes, spawning new lineages of its own — and leaving millions dead and disabled in its wake.

COVID is persistent. We’ve known for years that other coronaviruses, like SARS, can persist in your body long after initial infection. This is likely a byproduct of their evolutionary history; they evolved to spread through bat populations and survive bats’ unique immune systems. Bats are very long-lived for their size, potentially living for decades, even with multiple different infections quietly simmering inside them. However, in humans, these viruses’ tactics for suppressing a well-regulated bat immune system present a form of overwhelming force, which wreaks havoc on our bodies.

After the chaotic and potentially-lethal initial stage of acute infection, the virus is able to settle in for the long haul — evidence has been found in the gut, in human waste, and among “cured” patients. This can happen whether the acute phase was disastrous and hospital-worthy, or quiet enough for you to experience no symptoms at all. By this point, the virus will have suppressed your body’s immune memory, infiltrated throughout various organ systems — including your cardiovascular, nervous, and renal systems — and begun pumping out a steady supply of new virus. Of course, this persistent infection causes damage to the various organs where the virus has made its home, especially since it can trigger further inflammation. Your immune system is constantly trying to smoke it out, damaging more organ tissue as it does so. Your risk of heart attacks, strokes, neurological symptoms, and death in general are much higher during this persistent phase — and it only gets worse with every reinfection. It still remains unclear how long this persistent phase can last — certainly as many months as have been studied so far.

Evidence has been mounting for years that COVID is actually a type of autoimmune disorder, with several components of your immune system turning against your own cells. Not only are pro-inflammatory molecules heightened in both the acute infection and in so-called long COVID, high levels of antibodies against normal cellular pieces have been found in over half of patients hospitalized with COVID. The implications of COVID triggering autoimmunity are broad and can get fairly technical, but needless to say, the population being infected over and over with such a debilitating virus is catastrophic.

The Motive

Why would governments, public health officials, news media, business leaders, and every other trusted voice tell us outright lies (such as “COVID is not airborne!”) and avoid highlighting crucial truths (such as COVID’s propensity to damage immune systems)? Why would such a simple thing as distributing and mandating the proper usage of high-quality respirators — a layup of public health policy — be portrayed as being so toxic that to suggest it would get you laughed out of the room? Why would institutions like the CDC casually mention the existence of long COVID with one breath, and with the next, pat themselves on the back for “diminished hospitalizations”? Why has the entirety of public health policy contracted down to “Get vaccinated and you’re free”?

Part of it is simple ignorance: in the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot we didn’t know. There were clues, of course; hypotheses based on what we knew about other coronaviruses. We could have guessed at airborne transmission, immune suppression, viral persistence, and rapid evolution, but we didn’t know these things conclusively. We didn’t know the exact numbers for case fatality, transmission, long-term symptoms, etc. But we didn’t need to know. The precautionary principle could have guided us to keep up avoidance and containment practices until we knew exactly what we were dealing with. And yet, the clearer the picture has become, the more we have reduced those measures, instead of ramping them up. COVID is more dangerous than initially expected, and yet we have continued to make ourselves more vulnerable.

The cold truth of the matter is that the motive behind COVID minimization is greed and social control. The capitalist system depends on constant growth: constant production, constant consumption, constant expansion of profits. Even brief pauses — such as a month-long stay-at-home order — have disastrous effects on capital. Implementing the mass prevention strategies necessary to slow down transmission (daily rapid testing, contact tracing, guaranteed paid leave for exposed workers, high-quality respirators, etc.) is expensive, and eats into profits. An information campaign explaining why everyone needs to stay home, instead of contributing to “the economy,” eats into profits further. Winding down all non-essential business and keeping it shuttered until the true end of the pandemic would contract the economy down to only what is necessary for society to function. The opportunities for financial capital to invest in new, profitable enterprises would vanish faster than they reemerge.

For capitalism to function, it requires two things: a steady supply of workers producing value and an unending flow of consumption to realize that value as profit for the capitalist. The onset of a pandemic presented a challenge on both of those fronts. Workers getting sick en masse and being forced to stay home for a couple of weeks — or even dying or becoming disabled and exiting the workforce altogether — was only one potential headache for the capitalist class. Far worse was the prospect of workers staying home out of precaution, thereby grinding production to a halt. Consumers staying home and buying only the essentials would prevent the realization of profits across huge swathes of the economy, cutting off the flow of capital necessary to keep the whole system running.

The moment it became obvious to market analysts that COVID was more than just a local Chinese outbreak, it triggered utter panic in the financial sector. Fears about the slowdown of profits led to several mass stock sell-offs from investors, lowering stock value, triggering even more panic-selling, across multiple different days. This wasn’t just speculation: decreased demand for oil rapidly triggered a massive price war that caused prices to spiral for months until becoming negative, with the holders of oil futures paying to offload their contracts. Without ramping demand back up, production of this and other key commodities would be financially toxic.

Capitalism also relies on a reserve army of labor to keep labor costs artificially deflated. A contracted economy, in which any worker willing to work is a rare commodity, tips the balance of power in favor of workers. Workers could more easily bargain for higher wages and safer working conditions (including liberal COVID leave). Most worryingly of all, in the context of long-term precautionary measures, the population would get used to a dangerous notion — that we have value beyond our labor and our consumption. When faced with the prospect of death or disability, the contradictions become sharpened in our eyes. Hundreds of millions of workers would suddenly ask “Why am I risking my life for this?” The frustration at a choice between abject poverty and potentially contracting a debilitating condition would galvanize workers to stand up for our rights. Waves of labor mobilization, rent strikes, workplace lockouts, boycotts, and more would sweep the country — and the world. It would be the greatest challenge to the political power of the capitalist class in a century.

The Strategy

Actually solving the pandemic was never in the cards for the U.S. and the rest of the capitalist world. It would have necessitated deep international cooperation, massive investment in clean air infrastructure, a persistent information campaign (and censoring of hazardous misinformation), efforts to build public trust in government, guaranteed paid leave, nationalization of key industries, and more. Basically, it would involve massively undercutting the philosophy of free market capitalism.

Instead, the explicit goal of the ruling class has been to make the pandemic simply disappear from public perception. Any reminder of the existence of a highly-transmissible, highly-dangerous, mass-disabling disease could trigger panic, or worse: organized, militant labor action. Averting this crisis required a careful campaign of culture-crafting; the people themselves needed to become convinced that there was no reason to fight. Consent for protracted mass infection needed to be manufactured.

There are three main ways this hegemonic narrative around COVID has been propagated to the public: official rhetoric, public policy, and media framing. These three facets of idea propagation feed into each other, and all three are maneuvered in various ways by the interests of capital. The process by which a hegemonic narrative is crafted in the capitalist sphere is not quite as straightforward as one might expect. It’s not a simple matter of a state propaganda department deciding on a central doctrine, issuing scripts to paid actors, and imprisoning all who dissent. There is no party line for the capitalists, no single convocation of business elites, and relatively few shadowy backroom deals. Explicit planning meetings are held — independently — among the leadership of different ruling class parties and distinct business interests, and their similar class interests lead them to similar priorities. But the way narrative unity of this sort is achieved is not through an all-powerful conspiracy. Instead, the “decision” for how to frame events arises organically from the interplay of the many individual sectors that comprise the ruling class propaganda machine.

The tone struck by what we think of as official sources sets the stage for the broader social response. This rhetoric comes from a variety of places — heads of state, government agencies, individual experts, think tanks, and other entities imbued with a sense of authority. These are voices that we are socialized to pay attention to. When they speak, they easily garner media attention. A news outlet that ignores or disputes these sources loses access to them and invites flak, thereby harming their ability to sell more news. These voices are generally in the room when policies are crafted — or crafting the policies themselves. What “the experts” say matters, and the particular experts being promoted by governments and corporations have steadily coalesced around rhetoric that minimizes the public health threat of the virus.

Official rhetoric does not always come to total agreement on presentation. The two-party system in the U.S. is often characterized by competing “official” stances, even when both stances are de facto acceptable to the established capitalist order. Throughout 2020, many prominent figures, including Donald Trump, attempted to prematurely declare the end of the pandemic. The Great Barrington Declaration attempted to launder the notion that attempts to mitigate the pandemic were harmful, and that we should instead try to reach “herd immunity” by allowing the virus to run rampant through the population. This was a non-starter in terms of propaganda material, since we could all see the devastation in plain sight. However, this was still valuable to the ruling class, because it laid the groundwork for a potent narrative — that of the “level-headed pragmatists” guiding us through the pandemic. Against the backdrop of conspiracy theories, bunk cures, and political disengagement from the reality of the pandemic, there came a promise from the liberal wing of the ruling class: “Unlike our opponents, we actually care, and we will get you through this.” Despite the difference in tone, the trajectory of the policies themselves has largely been preserved across political lines.

Pandemic public policy has been both shaped by and indicative of the official rhetoric of whoever happens to be in charge. It has reflected the recommendations of experts — those experts which had been chosen by the ruling government. In places governed by more liberal tendencies, curfews and cloth mask mandates lasted longer, instilling an implicit message that, unlike those science-denying conservatives, the liberals were “following the science.” This meant that, when these half-measures were rescinded, it seemed obvious that now people could feel safe putting themselves at risk.

Every policy choice has acted to shape the public’s perception of the pandemic. Mandating that businesses put stickers on the floor to demarcate 6 feet of distance hammered home the false notion that being 6 feet apart from others protected you. Requirements that bars and restaurants be closed for indoor dining made people reckon with the fact that these necessarily-unmasked spaces were dangerous. Reversing that restriction while mask recommendations were still in effect created confusion and demonstrated that the recommendations were meaningless. School districts shuttering physical classrooms put every parent on high alert for their children’s safety, while so-called “hybrid learning” taught people that safety was a parent’s choice. As school districts moved away from virtual school altogether, the message became clear: there is no reason to worry about your children getting sick. Steadily, measures put into place to protect people from the virus have been reversed, until the current state of affairs, where every public health “policy” has become instead a recommendation — and those recommendations don’t even come close to establishing true safety.

Economic measures taken during the pandemic have worked in a similar way to public health policy. In the beginning, policies were put in place to help the people who would be economically impacted: paycheck protection programs, tax credits, expanded unemployment benefits, eviction moratoria, stimulus checks, and student debt deferral. This aid was granted to ensure that the economic situation for the working class never got so despondent that workers would have greater incentive to rebel through labor militancy, rent strikes, or even violent uprisings. As these measures dried up, they came with the accompanying message: “You’re on your own now.”

Throughout the pandemic, media attention has been focused on reproducing official rhetoric through op-eds and interviews. The experts promoted above all have always been selected based on their proximity to power, both in terms of their official appointment and their rhetorical line. As governments and agencies solidified their pandemic-minimization rhetoric and policies, individuals who championed that line became even more appealing. The lure of manufactured conflict allowed media companies to profit by highlighting astroturfed, unpopular movements protesting all forms of public health policy. Depending on their particular cultural bent, news corporations could position themselves either as “freedom-fighters,” standing up to the government tyranny of half-baked precautionary measures, or as “champions of reason,” pushing back against misinformation and science denial.

In all cases, the pivot in 2021 was palpable. Now that vaccines had arrived, there was a feasible narrative for transitioning away from “economically-disruptive restrictions.” As soon as you got vaccinated, you were free to get back to normal. “Fresh air smells sweeter without masks!” proclaimed the first lady, triumphantly. Summer of 2021 was full of freshly-inoculated people enjoying significant levels of antibody-based protection, and cases were at their lowest point. The media trumpeted this wonderful news at every opportunity, showcasing ecstatic public health officials, booming businesses, and throngs of maskless people, while ignoring the still-omnipresent circulation of background cases.

Prognosis

With every new major variant, cries of “No one could have seen this coming!” quickly give way to “At last, the pandemic is over.” The same refuted myths of herd immunity, hybrid immunity, and vaccinated immunity keep cropping up, only to be dashed to pieces by the next wave. In the latter half of 2022, we entered a phase of multiple overlapping variants — all deliberately still referred to by their parent, omicron, to avoid panic. The baseline of weekly infections and deaths have remained higher than at any other phase of the pandemic, save for spikes as a new dominant strain emerged. The expert, government, and media line has stagnated at a calibrated silence, interspersed with the occasional recommendation to get vaccinated. Fitted respirators are recommended (lumped in with less-effective cloth and surgical masks), but they are not mandated, and rarely even modeled. Schools are fully in-person, despite their established role as hotspots of community transmission. At every opportunity, governments, corporations, and community organizations congratulate themselves on making it through the pandemic.

This is not simple negligence on the part of those who govern and shape our society. It amounts to social murder: the establishment of policies that place large numbers of people on the path to an early and unnatural death. You have the right to health, and that right is being deliberately stripped away from you with a policy of mass infection. Just because the choice isn’t being made with the specific goal of eliminating us (such as in the case of genocide), doesn’t absolve the choice itself. And that choice is being continually reaffirmed every day. The calculation has been made with no special regard for human health; only the preservation of the social order. Too much death and disease could challenge the power of the ruling class; 15 million excess deaths is just the cost of doing business.

We are at a crossroads in this ongoing crisis. As we continue to pretend everything is normal, the virus continues to evolve. Multiple lineages are circulating, accumulating mutations that help them evade immunity and run roughshod over defenseless populations. The next uber-variant is likely already here: the XBB.1 lineage is as different from the original SARS-CoV-2 virus as that virus was from SARS, and has an even higher ability to infect cells. With every wave that washes over us, our organs and our immune systems become weaker. Life expectancy is declining at an alarming rate. We are an increasingly disabled population, with no community support — or even awareness. The longer we allow ourselves to be governed by a culture of individualism, capitalist greed, and ignorance, the sicker we will all become.