J : There’s been a rumor of a bio­lo­gi­cal trade war bet­ween the United States and China. It has gai­ned momen­tum after dis­pu­ted social media talks on U.S. patents, articles publi­shed in Granma and mutual accu­sa­tions of the Chinese Foreign Minister and CIA agents against each other. How do you see this cir­cus ?

RW : Such utter­ly unfoun­ded accu­sa­tions are part and par­cel of what I call pan­de­mic thea­ter. The efforts we just tal­ked of to control popu­la­tions within-coun­try are riva­led only by attempts to pin blame for the present pan­de­mic and its socioe­co­no­mic rami­fi­ca­tions upon other coun­tries. These are all modern updates on cal­ling diseases after an inter­na­tio­nal ene­my, now spun into vast, unsub­stan­tia­ted conspi­ra­to­rial theo­ries aimed at fast-tal­king debun­kers into exhaus­tion. What were pre­vious­ly sim­pli­fied into piquant aliases, such as the Spanish flu or the French disease, are now wound into sto­ries about Wuhan labs or bio­war­fare gone amok.

Much as for UFOlogy—space sau­cers, aliens, and the like—perpetrators of such frauds and their dupes are see­king a means by which to avoid gras­ping the mate­rial roots by which capi­tal-led modes of pro­duc­tion are increa­sing our vul­ne­ra­bi­li­ties to the emer­gence of mul­tiple patho­gens of pan­de­mic or near-pan­de­mic capa­ci­ty. We’ve seen in rapid suc­ces­sion, upon defo­res­ta­tion and deve­lop­ment, H5N1, SARS‑1, H1N1 (2009), MERS, H7N9, Ebola Makona, Zika, African swine fever, and now SARS‑2 exit out of mar­gi­na­li­zed wild reser­voirs across poul­try and live­stock and into human popu­la­tions. Blaming an ene­my allows rulers to avoid having to blame them­selves for the sud­den surge in mul­tiple dead­ly diseases.