Report or activist project
Hsc
lecture-2.pptxA local experience of possible zoonosis
Leptospirosis: a Zoonotic Disease in Daceyville for $117.00
‘Leptospirosis is an infection in rodents and other wild and domesticated species. Rodents are implicated most often in human cases. The infection in man is contracted through skin abrasions and the mucosa of the nose, mouth and eyes. Exposure through water contaminated by urine from infected animals is the most common route of infection. Human-to-human transmission is rare.’
This is a bacteria not a virus.
https://www.who.int/zoonoses/diseases/leptospirosis/en/
https://www1.racgp.org.au/ajgp/2018/march/leptospirosis
The types of viral infection we have now that come from animals occurs because we invade the homes of wild animals and intensively farm domesticated animals ie it is largely our actions that create our illness and in the process harm many animals eg all the chickens, ducks, turkeys and others who were killed in the ‘bird flu’ outbreak.
The central point of the lecture
Opening thoughts
Arundhati Roy
“[u]nlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far —in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.”
https://www.isa-sociology.org/frontend/web/uploads/files/Post-COVID-19%20Sociology.pdf
McNeill:
‘the way infectious diseases have begun to come back shows that we remain caught in the web of life – permanently and irretrievably – no matter how clever we are at altering what we do not like, or how successful we become at displacing other species’ (1998 [1976]: 16).
The virus
https://hongkongfp.com/2020/02/19/coronavirus-need-rethink-relationship-wild-animals
video
DEBATE ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF THE VIRUS
This illustration, created at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reveals ultrastructural morphology exhibited by coronaviruses. Note the spikes that adorn the outer surface of the virus, which impart the look of a corona surrounding the virion, when viewed electron microscopically. https://www.cdc.gov/media/subtopic/images.htm
Virus could not have come from lab in Wuhan
Three new studies on the origin of COVID-19 “absolutely” demonstrate the virus could not have come from a laboratory leak 30 kilometres from the Wuhan market that the virus spread from, according to Eddie Holmes, NSW’s 2020 scientist of the year and the winner of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science in 2021.
An evolutionary scientist from Sydney University, Professor Holmes co-authored two multinational studies released as preprints over the weekend. He said they show the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the epicentre of the original COVID-19 outbreak that has now killed more than 5 million people.
https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/covid-19-virus-absolutely-did-not-come-from-lab-leak-20220228-p5a08h
Virus could not have come from lab in Wuhan
“What this [work] suggests is that the Huanan market is not the amplifier, it’s the starting point that began from multiple species jumps in that market, and it spread out of there,” Professor Holmes told The Australian Financial Review.
“What it absolutely excludes is there is no conceivable way you can get that pattern if the virus had escaped from a laboratory that’s located 30 kilometres away.
“I think the ship has sailed on the lab theory. I can’t see how you can explain those data with a lab leak from a lab that is some distance away.”
https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/covid-19-virus-absolutely-did-not-come-from-lab-leak-20220228-p5a08h
Virus could not have come from lab in Wuhan
“Together, these analyses provide dispositive evidence for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 via the live wildlife trade and identify the Huanan market as the unambiguous epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said a lead author of one of the international studies and corresponding author of the other, University of Arizona professor Michael Worobey.
Australia has been among a number of countries calling for a robust investigation into where and how the virus originated in Wuhan late 2019.
Without conclusive quality data and independent scientific research, there has been a voluble partisan group, mostly in the US, pushing a claim the pandemic started with a leak from a top-security biological lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located on the other side of the Yangtze River from the market.
https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/covid-19-virus-absolutely-did-not-come-from-lab-leak-20220228-p5a08h
Or could it?
Virologist Marion Koopmans, who was a member of the WHO expert team that travelled to China, said the study led by Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, provided “convincing evidence” that the market was, indeed, the place where it had all begun.
But Chan and other scientists say the papers made claims based on incomplete data and biased samplings. And for scientists tracing how the virus spread – especially in the early days – the dearth of data made available by China has proved particularly challenging.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/5/covid-19-source-china-animal-or-lab
Or could it?
Hoping to trace the pandemic to its start, last spring virologist Jesse Bloom at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle tried to lay his hands on the genetic sequences of SARS-CoV-2 from the earliest cases out of China – only to find the data had been removed from the open-access site maintained by the US National Institutes of Health, at the request of Chinese researchers. As the owners of the data, the scientists have the right to request its removal without having to give a reason.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/5/covid-19-source-china-animal-or-lab
Or could it?
Also, the widely shared observation that right from the start the virus has unique features that made it extremely adapted to infecting humans en masse continues to baffle even specialists on coronaviruses.
“Dispositive evidence for a natural origin of SARS1 and MERS had been quickly found despite less advanced technologies at the time. Yet, for SARS2, we still cannot find any infected animals that could’ve passed the virus to humans at the market and we have not obtained evidence to tell us when and how the virus was spreading in Wuhan before mid-December 2019,” Chan said.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/5/covid-19-source-china-animal-or-lab
Covid: the point
Regardless of whether the virus was transmitted by animals or via a lab, Rosemary McFarlane, assistant professor in public health at the University of Canberra, says a lot can be done to staunch the risk of the next outbreak.
That is because both scenarios point to the longstanding problems of how humans handle wild animals. Keeping them in close quarters in trade and transit has compounded the possibility of viruses jumping between animals and to humans.
“We can continue to debate the origin of this pandemic, but we need to understand what the risks are now, as the virus circulates amongst people with low access to vaccination, and amongst those in close proximity to animals. All of this provides opportunity for further virus evolution,” said McFarlane. This pandemic “is a wake-up call to the possibility of future risk”.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/5/covid-19-source-china-animal-or-lab
Race, Species, Nature and Power
Kim, CJ 2015, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age, Cambridge University Press.
Claire Kim
To the contrary, my argument is that our interpretive success depends on our ability and willingness to engage with these two taxonomies of power, race and species, at once – and to understand their connectedness. All three cases in this book are situated both in a narrative history of racial and cultural persecution and in a narrative history of human domination over the animal, and these two narratives are interwoven in important ways.
First premise of her argument
I begin with two theoretical premises. The i rst premise is that categories of difference – race, species, culture, sex – are historically and socially constructed rather than given by nature. Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States (1994) shaped a generation of scholarship with its insistence on viewing race as an “unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly transformed by political struggle” (55) rather than as a i xed and heritable biological essence. Nature, of course, has always offered up a great deal of visible human variation by way of skin color, hair texture, facial features, and so forth, but “race” is a historically and culturally mediated way of reading, classifying, and ranking bodies, of assigning some more worth than others on the basis of physical variation. It is a means of producing and disciplining different and inferior bodies
Second premise
My second theoretical premise is that differences are co-constituted or produced as effects of power in a profoundly interdependent way.
The concept of taxonomy
With this in mind, I propose two modest adjustments to the notion of “interlocking” dualisms. The first is that we think in terms of taxonomies rather than dualisms – complex classification systems instead of simple dyads. Race is not expressed as a binary of white over black (or white over nonwhite) but as a complex, fluid set of multiple positions (Kim 1999 , 2000 ). The taxonomy concept encourages us to ask questions about relationality, positionality, and multidimensionality that are obscured by the dualism concept – for example, how to move beyond the presumptive homogenization of nonwhite group experiences and toward an explanation of their differential proximity to and participation in racial power (Sexton 2010).
Oppressions as synergistical
The second modest adjustment is to think of forms of domination as synergistically related rather than “interlocking.” Anne McClintock ( 1995 ) admonishes us not to think of formative cultural categories as “armatures of Lego” (5) and urges us instead to consider how they “converge, merge and overdetermine each other in intricate and often contradictory ways” (61–2). Indeed, the mechanical language of “interlocking” predisposes us to think of axes of power as standardized, fungible units that i t together in some predetermined fashion. The dangers of this kind of mindless pluralism are profound: we may i nd ourselves casually presuming (as opposed to being able to demonstrate) a universal equivalence among various forms of domination, x=y=z (that they are all equally salient and of equal moral importance), and presuming that the dynamics of co-constitution are everywhere and at all times the same and predictable. If we think of oppressions as synergistically related rather than “interlocking” – that is, if we substitute an energy metaphor for an architectural one – we are less likely to fall into the trap of mindless pluralism and more likely to remain attuned to the unevenness, messiness, complexity, fluidity, and unpredictability that actually mark the dynamics of difference production
Single optic vision
The theoretical arguments, concepts, and arguments I advance here assume a context of (provisional) irresolvability. In the impassioned disputes examined here, each side embraces what I call single-optic vision, a way of seeing that foregrounds a particular form of injustice while backgrounding others. Looking through a single optic or lens – cruelty to animals, ecological harm, racism, or something else – these parties see but they also do not see, and these two facts are of course connected. Every act of illumination also obscures. For reasons having to do with economies of affect as well as institutional incentives, most social justice struggles mobilize around a single-optic frame of vision. The process of political conl ict then generates a zero-sum dynamic whereby single-optic vision leads predictably to what I call a posture of mutual disavowal – an explicit dismissal of and denial of connection with the other form of injustice being raised. This posture, I will argue, is both ethically and politically troubling.
Multi-optic vision
Multi-optic vision encourages a reorientation toward an ethics of mutual avowal, or open and active acknowledgment of connection with other struggles (“This matters to me and relates to me” instead of “That has nothing to do with me.”) If disavowal is a closing off, a repudiation, a turning away from, avowal is an opening, a recognition, a turning toward. Developing such an ethics would not rule out the practice of critique – in fact, it might well generate or intensify critique aimed at countering particular manifestations of domination – but it would transform the contours and spirit of critique. If we develop an ethics of mutual avowal in relation to other justice struggles, we not only reduce the chance we will reinscribe other forms of oppression (even inadvertently), but also open ourselves to new ways of imagining ourselves in relation to others. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, María Elena García advances a cosmopolitical approach that calls upon us to pay attention to other life worlds and be attentive to “a wider range of potentially intersecting i elds of subjectivities, power, and resistance” (2013, 507). I see this project, and specii cally the argument about disavowal and avowal, as moving in this direction .
Supremacies and neo-liberalism
An ethics of avowal is ultimately about constructing a reimagined “we” in resistance to the neoliberal elites waging war against racialized groups, animals, nature, and others. Race, species, and other taxonomies of power structure how we see, think, feel, and act, and as long as they remain intact, the dominative practices that grow out of them will l ourish. It may be that only use, available at, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of Impassioned Disputes a ruthless deconstruction of these synergistic taxonomies will move us in the direction of social justice and ecological salvation. We hear a lot about particularized forms of justice – justice for Black people, justice for women, justice for workers, justice for immigrants. But can we imagine a world wherein one form of supremacy has been eradicated but all other supremacies persist? Would we want to? The answer to neoliberalism’s destructive practices and values is not to marginally broaden the category of benei ciaries of this destructiveness but rather, through a critical and transformational politics, to radically restructure our relationships with each other, animals, and the earth outside of domination .
