Time to read: 5 minutes
We share the planet with over 380 trillion viruses right now. Some of these powerful pathogens can kill us and even bring the world to a standstill, as the new coronavirus did in 2020.
Viruses teach us how “undeniably connected we are and how important it is to take care of one another,” according to Steven Thrasher, a journalist and academic.
That lesson seemed to have been lost, he said, when President Joe Biden recently declared the pandemic “over” while appearing on 60 Minutes.
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“It’s indefensible,” Thrasher said. “It is extremely insensitive, given that thousands of people are dying every week.”
In his new book, “The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll when Inequality and Disease Collide,” Thrasher writes that COVID-19 caused “millions, if not billions, of humans to consider for the first time how living with a common virus can make someone feel like an outcast.” Thrasher’s masterful storytelling and meticulous reporting provide an important framework to help us understand why viruses can have mixed outcomes in communities of color.
Thrasher, who earned his Ph.D. from New York University and has spent decades writing about the HIV and AIDS epidemic, he writes about 12 social vectors, including racism, ableism, law enforcement, and austerity, that help create the viral underclass.
*This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Covering the pandemic in chicago, I wrote about the same dynamic described in your book and it is an important framework. What is the viral subclass?
I first heard it from activist Sean Strub, who was using it to talk about how people living with HIV live under a different set of laws. i started to think [how to] use it as a framework, when the COVID-19 pandemic occurred, and use it as an analysis [tool] to understand why certain types of people continue to end up in the path of viruses and why they have disparate impacts on their health, particularly disparate impacts on their deaths. I started to think of it this way, because I could see early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, that the same kind of people who were affected by HIV and AIDS were initially affected by COVID-19, even at a lower level. geographic than first deadly super wave.
Before the moment of infection, incarceration and poverty, racism, homophobia, ableism all affect people’s bodies in ways that will have disparate impacts with viruses if they find them.
A copy of ‘The Viral Underclass’.
A copy of ‘The Viral Underclass’.In your book, you describe prophylaxis as “practices and physical objects that can prevent the transmission of communicable diseases”. How did it develop during this pandemic?
Prophylaxis can be a very physical thing. A condom can stop the transmission of HIV, Ebola, Zika, and other pathogens. It can also be something like a mask or face shield.
Not everyone is at the same risk. They are at very different levels of risk, depending on the type of job they have, the conditions of their work, the decisions of their employers, and the decisions of the state.
There are educational levels of prophylaxis, there are economic levels of prophylaxis: people who have access to a home are much safer than people who are homeless, whether on the street or in shelters with many other people. The economy also plays an important role.
What is the myth of white immunity? Do you think this myth was reinforced during the pandemic after we saw that COVID-19 was disproportionately killing Black and Brown Americans?
There’s an immunity that comes with whiteness: Up to a point, on average, white people have better health outcomes, they do better financially. But like all forms of immunity, it’s not complete, it’s not eternal, it doesn’t apply to all white people. They are at less risk but sometimes they will think they are not at risk, which is not true. Social science has shown that the more white people understood that COVID deaths were occurring primarily among non-white people, the less they cared. But that’s also at your own risk, because hundreds of thousands of white people have also died of COVID-19. White immunity will cause white people to act in ways that are not in their own interests.
Let’s talk about the Michael Johnson case. A black gay man sentenced to more than 30 years in prison for allegedly failing to disclose his HIV status to his sexual partners. Johnson was released in part because of the reports of him. What can we learn from the ways the government has criminalized people living with HIV?
The case was extremely chilling. I sat through the entire trial. What I learned from that was that it is easier for society to blame an individual scapegoat than to deal with the very complicated, difficult, messy, economically challenging things that need to be addressed with pandemics.
Michael had one of the worst prison sentences ever handed down for someone with HIV, as if this pandemic was somehow his fault. At a time when 35 to 40 million people were living with that virus, it’s completely off the scale. It’s not realistic or humane in any way to think about locking up 35-40 million people with HIV, because they all got HIV from someone, and you couldn’t lock them all up. That wouldn’t solve anything and that wouldn’t be humane or ethical. But what really scared me in the COVID-19 pandemic was seeing a similar dynamic happening. There were a lot of very violent arrests in the first few months for not maintaining social distancing, not wearing a mask, or going out after curfew. Nearly every person the NYPD arrested, cited, beaten, or threw to the ground was black because there is a misperception that viruses are black or racialized.
The chapter entitled “parasite” was an indictment of capitalism. Why did you include this chapter?
Capitalism is one of the main reasons why we have pandemics in the world. We see examples of this over and over again. There’s a phrase I’ve heard from AIDS activists who have used it since the mid-1990s: “Science won the battle, but capitalism won the war.”
What they mean by that is that since the early 1980s, there was terror and sadness about all the deaths that were happening around AIDS. It took 15 years, but eventually, the drugs became available. It is a true kind of miracle of science. Science won that battle. But then capitalism won the war because tens of millions of people don’t get the pills, a million people a year still die of AIDS. That is because of capitalism. It’s because of intellectual copyrights and trademarks that corporations didn’t want to share with other countries. They wanted to make a profit. That is outrageous because drug development for the HIV drug, as with COVID-19, was funded to some extent by the state. Enormous state resources are devoted to the development of these drugs and treatments. But private corporations find a way to capture that and prevent it from being shared.
The same thing happened with COVID-19 vaccines: Pfizer, Moderna.
Capitalism itself economically structures society and relationships in such a way that there is a viral underclass or underclass. It produces uneven health outcomes and rations treatments or withholds them for profit. The system itself breeds disease.
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