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Entering into the 4th year of the devastating Covid pandemic — despite all the official claims that the pandemic is over with a return to ‘normal’ with masking and other protections being lifted – it is a time for urgent critical analysis and action. Here are some notes I put together last month towards this. I hope they are useful.
The Pandemic is Not Over!
Official and Public Health policies that act like the pandemic is over are a death and infection sentence for disabled, elderly, immune-compromised and Black, racialized and poor people. Many people have characterized this as a eugenic response (culling the population so that only the ‘fit’ survive), drawing on earlier ‘herd immunity’ perspectives for ‘expendable’ people. [1] As we saw very clearly at the Davos Forum for the capitalist elite they practice safer measures for themselves that they deny to the rest of us. They are the only one’s to be protected from Covid, the rest of us can be ‘disposed’ of.
Covid and its new variants continue to kill and infect people around the world. In ‘Canada’ there have been more than 51,000 reported deaths and more than 4.59 million infections. In 2022 there were more deaths in ‘Canada’ from Covid then in 2020 or in 2021. We are not hearing about this given the official mythologies of many variants as ‘mild’ and that it is now endemic (will always be around) or is over. There are also increasing mainstream media and even popular references to the pandemic period as now past.
Globally officially close to 7 million people have died (likely more like 15 -20 million) with more than 680 million being infected. And Covid is now destroying people’s immune systems and making people disabled with Long Covid with both new and reactivated infections. And beyond the official statistical social organization of knowledge which silences this there are millions of people living (more than 65 million) with Long-Term Covid. Conservative estimates suggest that close to 30% of people affected by COVID develop long-term disabilities and health problems and this is increasing.
Silence = Death!
When I was an AIDS activist in the 1980s and early 1990s one of our major slogans was “Silence=Death!” originating with AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) groups in NYC and across the USA. This silence about AIDS and resulting lack of AIDS action literally led to the deaths of thousands of people with AIDS/HIV. AIDS activism broke the silence of state, medical professionals, public health and pharmaceutical corporations making visible the experiences of People Living with AIDS/HIV (PLWA/HIVs). We actively responded to those who dismissed AIDS through asserting it only affected ‘expendable/disposable’ groups — like men having sex with men, Haitians, people from Africa, drug users, and sex workers. We broke this silence through direct action (die-ins, sit-ins, occupations, disruptions) and through speaking out linked with popular education. We put our bodies on the line.
This activism was based on the self-organization of People Living With AIDS (PLWAs). We won important victories regarding treatment access extending and improving people’s lives and through anti-discrimination efforts. All of this is still very relevant in the current Covid pandemic, and even though Covid is very different from HIV, it is similarly immune-suppressing. The social organization of forgetting of this AIDS organizing and activism
[2] has been deadly in undermining our social abilities to deal with Covid.
It has been painful living through the continuing pandemic with people I know getting sick (sometimes multiple times), with some developing Long Covid, with a few dying, and knowing that the response could have been otherwise.[3]
Even though it has only been three years, the pandemic has a very long history[4] Having lived through the AIDS crisis as an activist I know that things would have been very different with popular education, community organizing and mass and direct action activism moving far beyond the limitations of public health and the profit orientation of the pharmaceutical corporations and governments.[5]
Part of this is naming the problem not just as official silence — although this remains crucial as in the silence surrounding Covid deaths, Long-Covid, that Covid is airborne in transmission, and regarding possible treatments — but as racial capitalist social relations themselves. As Raia Small points out “we need to call the pandemic what it is: an exercise in eugenics, a mass disabling event, and an escalation of racialized class warfare.”
[6] This is unfortunately not how most of the left, social movements and unions have understood it. How can we best respond to this challenge? Remembering AIDS activism is one way of beginning to do this. It is unfortunate that the social organization of the forgetting of AIDS activism and organizing has led to these acquisitions being forgotten.
We can now make connections between AIDS organizing/activism and anti-Covid organizing more clearly. Early on there was important mutual aid Covid support work
[7] which continues in many areas that are similar to the AIDS support and buddy systems building support and caring relations for people affected by Covid that begin to rupture with capitalist relations. We are also seeing in the US and ‘Canada’ the beginning of people living with Long Covid self-organizing and that is generating activism.This needs to be extended and made more visible. As more people self-organize who are living with Covid this makes for a new experiential basis for producing knowledge. This is transforming the initial development of treatment access issues and treatment politics for people living with Covid who can learn a lot from AIDS activist treatment organizing, treatment agendas, community research initiatives and campaigns for access to clinical trials and not just pharma/medical backed double-blind placebo controlled trials which deny potentially life-saving treatments to many participants.
It seems very appropriate now therefore to riff off Silence=Death! from AIDS activism to the numerous ways in which for so many people on this planet the social organization of the pandemic literally means that Capitalism=Death! Silence=Death! which is still very relevant must be extended to address the pandemic social murder captured through using Capitalism= Death!
Pandemic Racial Capitalism – The New Disaster Capitalism.
As Small also suggests “In the context of this social murder [my italics] – [we see] a form of heightened class war waged by the rich, who are increasing their profits by forcing poor people to continue working, with inadequate protection, through waves of infection.”
[8] This is unfortunately a largely one-sided race/class war so far. This is a new form of pandemic racial capitalism which like Naomi Klein’s analysis of ‘disaster capitalism’ in The Shock Doctrine
[9] is the restructuring of capitalism to intensify exploitation and profit rates; to weaken social resistance and our movements; and to eliminate groups they define as ‘disposable/expendable.’ It becomes a new regime through which ‘surplus’ groups are disposed of and that unpaid care, reproductive and survival work is pushed onto women (cis and trans) and people with disabilities themselves and their care-givers. This pandemic racial capitalism is both an attack on people currently living with disabilities and also as many have described it “a mass disabling event” preventing people from being able to engage in wage-labour for social support. This is also linked to the expansion and intensification of policing as the police become an important vehicle for getting rid of unhoused, poor and other ‘surplus’ people.
a)
Need for a Radical Anti-Disability Politics
Developing a radical anti-disability perspective is crucial since a failure to “incorporate an analysis of disability and ableism are detrimental to our vision and organizing capacity. Capitalism is fundamentally ableist, awarding the food and shelter necessary for survival on the basis of an individuals ability to work for pay.” Capitalism survives by turning
“disabled people unable to work [for wages], along with other unemployed people, into a surplus population whose existence disciplines employed workers into accepting poor working conditions and little pay … Work under capitalism is a disabling process, as workers become debilitated through unsafe jobsites, injuries from accidents or repetitive stress, and the mental and psychological tolls of a work culture that is almost universally unsustainable.“
[10]
b)
Racial Capitalism, Exploitation and ‘Surplus’ People.
There are a number of features of how pandemic racial capitalism restructures racial/class relations starting with what capitalist social relations are. Capitalism is based on the social relations of exploitation of paid and unpaid labour mediated through race, gender, ability, sexuality, age, health and other relations. As we learned during the continuing AIDS crisis epidemics/pandemics like Covid are condensations of the many just mentioned social relations along with the major limitations of state public health and health from above approaches and the medical/pharmaceutical capitalist industrial complex. Capitalist exploitation is based on the creation of wealth and profit for the capitalists as workers (both paid and unpaid) though their actions produce a new surplus value that is appropriated from them to become profit for capitalists.
Capital’s focus (especially under neoliberalism) is on immediate interests for profit and exploitation and not on the longer-term destruction of labour capacities, especially given that many sectors of capital want to get rid of ‘surplus’ labour. Many sectors of capital (including pharma, grocery chains, mining/resource extraction and far more) have greatly profited from how the social organization of the pandemic has made our resistance more difficult. Major profit for sections of capital have been made and wealth has been transferred to them during the pandemic as they are escalating and restructuring relations of exploitation. Capitalists are not particularly interested in actually ending Covid (although pharma corporations make lots of profit off of vaccine development and possible treatments with the state subsidization they are provided) but in making as much profit from it for as long as it continues. They also know that the pandemic despite the mass global uprising in 2020 against anti-Black racism and policing has often weakened people’s abilities to resist and organize against intensified exploitation, extraction capitalism, policing and social oppression. They also know that the pandemic is allowing them to get rid of ‘troublesome’/‘expendable’ groups.
As mentioned, a main feature of pandemic racial capitalism is restructuring capitalist relations against disabled and immune compromised people (including older people) as well as Black and racialized groups, poor people, and groups of low-income workers. In part this is about forcing labour back onto low or unpaid reproductive, care and survival workers, reinforcing gendered and racial divisions of labour. The lack of sick days also forces low-waged workers to continue going to factories, offices, hospitals, long-term care facilities and elsewhere when sick. This is what they mean when they say ‘live with covid’ since it meets their short-term interests in restoring and intensifying relations of exploitation. At the very same time this is very much about dying with Covid and developing Long-Covid and expelling more people with disabilities from the wage-labour force, with a major lack of social support.
[11] This is the creation of more ‘surplus,’ ‘disposable people’ to be abandoned. This is central to the actualities of pandemic racial capitalism.
Key to pandemic racial capitalism is a return to the capitalist ‘normality’ of exploitation where “the economy rules” with the dropping of mask mandates and people going back to wage labour in factories, offices, mines, banks. The other side of the growth of capitalist profit based on exploitation is an intensification of its ableist, racialized and gendered character. The abandonment of mask mandates, reliance in the north and west on vaccines that Covid variants are escaping from and silencing news of Covid deaths and Long Covid means that even earlier strategies like “flattening the curve” (never a virus suppression strategy) based on preventing hospital crisis are now gone intersecting with a growing and intensifying hospital and health crisis based in neoliberalism, austerity, privatization and commodification. There is also a social organization of forgetting of the recent historical past and present of the ravages of Covid.
Many of these groups considered ‘disposable’ are seen as ‘unproductive’ for capital. This treating of older people as ‘unproductive’ is in contrast to many Indigenous practices that view elders as the holders of knowledge and wisdom. This construction of groups as unproductive/disposable is also based on the privileging of the need for profit and of the capitalist ‘economy’ over people’s lives but without recognizing that it is people who socially produce what is called the ‘economy’ based on the exploitation of waged and unwaged labour. We must contest the separation of the economic from the social and the many problems with economic determinism (the economy rules all!). One of the major social dynamics within capitalist relations in the pandemic has been to get people back to exploited labour and the making of profit for capital as soon as possible or else expelling them from the wage labour force and cutting social supports to ‘surplus’ people. The ‘needs’ of the capitalist ‘economy’ is a reification (transforming social relations between people into relations between things) of what is produced through social relations between people and which instead becomes a thing-like entity – ‘the economy’ — with determining agency over our lives. Often this has a clear but also shifting racialized character given racial divisions of labour and racially defined limits to access to health-care. There was an early racist focus on people from China and Asians that has now been returned to with the ending of Chinese state ‘zero covid’ from above policies and the resulting explosion of infections and deaths and the focus of global Covid testing restrictions on people from China. This is again actively producing anti-Asian racism.
Limitations of Nation-State Approaches: Vaccine and Treatment Apartheid
Within pandemic racial capitalist state formation the pandemic is addressed as a problem within nation-states and not as a global pandemic requiring global solidarity and action. Western, northern states like ‘Canada’ have addressed the problem to attend to the needs of its ‘citizens’ and its capitalist class and not refugees/migrants, those living in poverty, and those in the global south. This has prioritized the profit rates of the pharmaceutical and other capitalist corporations and the exploitation of labour (both paid and unpaid) over the needs of the most affected within the boundaries of the nation state and people in the global south. As a result, Canadian state policies (including throwing away vaccines that people could have used in the global south) have played an integral part in constructing the relations of vaccine apartheid, which is especially devastating for poorer people in the global south already ensnared in relations of neo-colonialism, imperialism and underdevelopment. In 2022 while 80% of the people in ‘high-income’ countries had been vaccinated in ‘low-income’ counties this was true for only about 13%. In 2022 around 3 billion people were waiting for their first dose.
[12] Almost 1/3 (32%) of people worldwide have received no Covid vaccinations – mostly in the part of the world made – and left – impoverished through racism, colonialism, imperialism, and underdevelopment.
This also means that these areas and the bodies living there provide sites for the continuing mutation of the Covid virus which is expanding with new variants escaping the regulatory impact of the vaccines that have been developed. While the vaccines developed with much state financial support and making major profits for the pharma corporations have been useful in preventing deaths among those multi-vaccinated, until recently they were based on knowledge about the earlier versions of Covid and have not prevented infections or Long Covid and their effectiveness seems to be waning. To really address the pandemic on a global scale requires the ending of vaccine apartheid and making vaccines, treatments, masks and other personal protective equipment freely available to people in the global south and for a massive redistribution of resources to the global south. This was called for in the AIDS Activist Montreal Manifesto in 1989.
[13] New vaccines and treatments must be made available to everyone and must address the latest variants.
The Social Organization of Covid Knowledge
During the AIDS crisis we learned about the significance of the social organization of the knowledge regarding AIDS/HIV and its long-term shaping of the AIDS crisis including its early definition as “the gay plague” and as “Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID)” leading to a lasting homosexualization of AIDS. There were simultaneous and overlapping constructions of AIDS associated with Haitians and a racist construction of ‘African AIDS’ that has also been just as long lasting. The early adoption and shifting of the epidemiological category of “high risk groups” was used to suggest that men having sex with men, Haitians, Africans, drug users and sex workers were all ‘risks’ to the ‘general population’ coded as white, middle class and heterosexual which informed early public health and state policy. This was used to systematically organize discrimination and stigmatization against these groups. This is why we always need to ask whose health and which public is being defended rather than taking public health practices for granted.
With Covid the early social construction of knowledge in 2020 was that it was a respiratory disease that either killed people or was quickly recovered from. It was not considered airborne in transmission and Long Covid did not exist. The early statistical knowledge that was collected had nothing to do with Long Covid. More recently with the Omicron variants it was shifted and defined as being ‘mild’ and sometimes ‘flu-like’ leading to the ending of many mask mandates and protection measures in 2022 even though deaths were increasing. This very limited initial social construction of knowledge of Covid has had a lasting impact on social responses in the pandemic.
Despite this it is now clear that Covid while it initially often appears on the surface as a respiratory disease in bodies this is often just its first area of impact — or route of infection — and it is also a vascular, neurotropic and neurological disease leading to fatigue, strokes, heart problems and attacks on blood vessels and the brain causing cognitive decline. It weakens the immune system and reactivates earlier infections. More recently younger people are experiencing growing respiratory and heart problems with Covid infection.
Early and in some areas continuing public health knowledge and practice was based on Covid not being airborne in transmission. It took a long time for public health officials to finally recognize it was airborne with some still refusing to acknowledge this. Early on this was based on the already mentioned “Stay at home” imperative based on the construction of ‘public/private’ distinctions (even though ‘home’ is often dangerous for cis and trans women and queer and trans youth) and being outside was often safer. For instance, there were major problems early on with the public health pushing of the need for “social distancing” (as opposed to physical distancing) when we need the social more than ever to survive this pandemic—and we urgently need new forms of sociality based on social justice and anti-oppression practices, that includes mass protest and revolt, as we saw with the global uprising against anti-Black racism and the police in 2020.
The previously mentioned limited character of the social organization of the statistical knowledge about Covid limited awareness and knowledge of the full impact of the pandemic. And now even these limited stats are not being collected in many jurisdictions leading to a major lack of knowledge about the impacts of the pandemic in people’s lives.
Affected people have had to fight hard to get a broader notion of Covid recognized and still no official statistics were/are collected on this. This is one of the reasons that the simplistic line of just “rely on the science” is not adequate in relation to Covid (and more generally) since all scientific knowledge is historical and social in character and are contested terrains of struggle. For instance, many public health officials resisted for months (some still do) acknowledging that Covid is airborne regarding transmission, leading to many deaths and infections. Many have supported getting rid of mask mandates. It is becoming increasingly clear that Covid is far more than a respiratory infection, and as mentioned many get long-term Covid complications including not only respiratory but also cardiovascular, brain and other health problems.
State and public health measures regarding Covid have been based on edicts and rules/regulations from on high and not on popular education and community organizing against Covid. There has been a reliance on public health and state officials and the police.
[14] to enforce health rules rather than the needed popular education and community organizing as in the AIDS crisis. This is based on not remembering the major popular education and community organizing that led to people taking up safe and safer practices in the AIDS crisis. While there has been important mutual aid organizing this was often not based on popular education and major community organizing. Instead, the mainstream social response has been based on the tearing apart of social and collective responsibility and neoliberal individualism.
Neo-Liberalism
Neoliberal capitalism led to the undermining and destruction of social solidarity and responsibility. This becomes a crucial part of pandemic capitalism. In the years since the height of AIDS activism and organizing neoliberal individualism has worked over community-based practices of social responsibility turning the tables and making only the person affected responsible. This led to a focus only on the individual person with HIV infection’s responsibility leading to the criminalization of HIV ‘non-disclosure.’
[15] In the Covid pandemic this shifts responsibility onto individuals from the communities most affected, and especially onto the immune-compromised and people with disabilities. This transfers responsibility onto the people most devastatingly affected by Covid and it is clear it is the defence of capitalist relations of exploitation that is paramount.
[16] The individualist focus and lack of popular education also undermined people’s engagement in the Covid pandemic, opening up the space for the anti- masker/anti-vaxxer right-wing convergence and this white supremacist and often fascist right-wing developing a limited mass base in 2022. This right-wing won most of its demands and has extended its organizing to other areas including racist, pro-police and anti-drag, anti-trans and anti-queer organizing.
Unfortunately refusing to remember what was learned from AIDS activism left, movement and union organizing has largely taken up the ‘left’ flank of state and public health organizing policies regarding Covid. Unable to develop and implement a ‘zero covid’ or virus suppression strategy from below where the focus is on suppressing the virus itself and its rate of transmission
[17] they have therefore largely found themselves mouthing and supporting state, public health and even police strategies from a slightly more critical perspective. As Small points out the left, social movements and unions. “failed to show that another pandemic response is possible, and that our lives depend on fighting for it” and that
“The left’s job is not to accept the narrative of events that corporate media and government officials give us – ‘the pandemic’s over’ – but to craft our own, showing each other how many more people could be kept alive … We don’t need to accept mass infection. To survive this pandemic and the next one, we need to recognize that we all have a stake in transforming this extractive [racial capitalist] system, and together we have the power to shut it down.“
[18]
A very different possibility was suggested in the grass roots community safe sex and practice organizing and treatment activism in the context of AIDS. AIDS activism was based on refusing the social response of getting rid of ‘expendable’ people and fighting against discrimination and stigmatization. Drawing some suggestions from this for addressing the pandemic means putting the needs of those most affected at the centre of the social response; of health care for all; engaging in safer practices as everyone’s social responsibility as were safe sex and practices in the AIDS crisis; providing support for people infected and sick (including those with Long Covid) and for major non-capitalist funding for treatment and vaccine research, and for free and rapid access to safe and effective vaccines and treatments for those most directly affected including in the global south; an end to vaccine and treatment apartheid; a major transfer of resources to countries in the global south to fight the health crisis and a major move from a health from above approach defined by the medical elite and the pharmaceutical corporations to a health from below approach informed by feminist health movements and AIDS organizing where people get to take more control over their own bodies and health.
[19]
Action = Life!
Fortunately, along with Silence=Death!, the other major AIDS activist slogan Action=Life! involving direct action is still a crucial part of the solution.
[20] This is based on the need for mutual aid and care, bottom up popular education, safe direct and mass action, the self-organization of people living with Covid, and making non-capitalist caring relations as much as possible. This is based on a Covid zero/virus suppression strategy from below and not the recently abandoned authoritarian Chinese version of covid zero from above.
This includes a Health from below approach which in dramatic contrast to the ruling pro-capitalist health from above based approach of the medical/pharmaceutical industrial complex and public health measures takes up a health from below position contesting the racial capitalist social relations producing death, infection and illness for so many people. This approach rejects profits for pharma capitalism, reliance on public health, the defining of some people as ‘disposable’ and ‘expendable, and the limitations of official and statistical knowledge.
With the profit rates of the pharmaceutical industry and capitalist corporations at the centre it is clear why capitalist relations and the defence of private profit are driving these problems.. This is also rooted in racist unequal relations and imperialism, rooted in the ‘western’ capitalist countries becoming ‘overdeveloped’ based on the ‘underdevelopment’ of the global south. This renders people in the global south and poorer countries as ‘expendable’ in the pandemic, with little available treatment and very limited access to vaccines. Western and northern countries and their priorities do not place the needs and concerns of poorer people in the global south at the centre. As suggested earlier we need internationalist and not nationalist responses. Confronting racial capitalism, colonialism/imperialism with the need for an internationalist response is central.
This involves breaking silences, the active remembering of AIDS organizing and activism, but also putting capitalist social relations and profit directly in question. This requires naming the problem as pandemic racial capitalism which is also an anti-disability/eugenic capitalism.
Gary Kinsman writes from the Indigenous land of Tkaronto. This land is the territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. This is Dish with One Spoon Territory. The Dish With One Spoon is a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land. Subsequent Indigenous Nations and peoples, Europeans and newcomers, have been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship and respect. The “Dish” or sometimes it is called the “Bowl” represents what is now southern Ontario. We all eat out of the Dish—all of us that share this territory—with only one spoon. That means we have to share the responsibility of ensuring the dish is never empty; which includes, taking care of the land and the creatures we share it with. Importantly, there are no knives at the table, representing that we must keep the peace.
Gary Kinsman is a member of the AIDS Activist History Project and the No Pride in Policing Coalition. He was one the first three employees of the AIDS Committee of Toronto in 1983 and later involved in AIDS ACTION NOW! He is the author of The Regulation of Desire (a revised and updated third edition will be published by Concordia University Press in fall 2023 from which some of the ideas here are drawn) and co-author of the Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation with Patrizia Gentile.
[1] See Nora Leto, Spin Doctors, How Media and Politicians Misdiagnosed the COVID-19 Pandemic, Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood, 2021;Angela Mitropoulos, “‘Herd Immunity’ Was Originally About Vaccination. Now It Is Neoliberal Violence,” interview with Angela Mitropoulos, by Max Haiven, Truthout, October 21, 2020, https://truthout.org/articles/herd-immunity-was-originally-about-vaccination-now-it-is-neoliberal-violence/; Michael Friedman, “Yih and Kulldorf’s ‘Radical’ Covid Strategy: A Recipe for Disaster,” Spectre, September 24, 2020, https://spectrejournal.com/yih-and-kulldorffs-radical-covid-strategy/.
[2] See The AIDS Activist History Project at https://aidsactivisthistory.ca/
[3] See Alexis Shotwell, Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding, Penn State University Press, 2011.
[4] See Gary Kinsman, “Some Notes on Learning from AIDS Activism for Our Responses to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic,” Radical Noise, March 18, 2020, https://radicalnoise.ca/2020/03/18/some-notes-on-learning-from-aids-activism-for-our-responses-to-the-coronavirus-covid-19-pandemic/, in French, “Quelques leçons du militantisme anti-SIDA pour s’organiser dans le contexte de la pandémie du Coronavirus (COVID-19),” Ouvrage, May 11, 2020, http://www.revue-ouvrage.org/quelques-lecons-du-militantisme-anti-sida-pour-sorganiser-dans-le-contexte-de-la-pandemie-du-coronavirus-covid-19/; “Learning from AIDS Activism for Surviving the COVID-19 Pandemic,” in Sick of the System: Why the COVID Recovery Must Be Revolutionary, ed. Between the Lines Editorial Committee, eds. (Toronto: Between the Lines, May 2020), 83–92, and the associated video, Sick of the System, “Sick of the System Interview – Gary Kinsman July 23, 2020,” YouTube, July 30, 2020, https://youtu.be/GUSa_6fUo-k.
[5] .Gary Kinsman, “Silence=Death, Action=Life: New Relevance in COVID Pandemic Times, Radical Noise, April 6, 2021 at: https://radicalnoise.ca/2021/04/06/silencedeath-action-life-new-relevance-in-covid-pandemic-times/
[6] Raia Small “Why Has the Left Deprioritized COVID?” Midnight Sun, 9:14, 2022 https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/why-has-the-left-deprioritized-covid/
[7] Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the next), Verso: 2020.
[8] Raia Small, “Why Has the Left Deprioritized COVID?” https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/why-has-the-left-deprioritized-covid/
[9] Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Allen Lane (Penguin), 2007).
[10] Raia Small, “Why Has the Left Deprioritized COVID?” https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/why-has-the-left-deprioritized-covid/
[11] Daniel Sarah Karasik, “What happens if Long Covid Makes More and More People Too Sick to Work?” Midnight Sun, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/what-happens-if-long-covid-makes-more-and-more-people-too-sick-to-work/
[12] Nadia A. Sam Agundu, Boghana Kabison Titanji, Fredos Okumu, and Madhukar Pai, “The Pandemic is Following a Very Predictable and Depressing Pattern,” Atlantic, March 4, 2022,https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/03/pandemic-global-south-disease-health-crisis/624179/
[13] See ACT-UP (New York), and AIDS ACTION NOW! (Toronto). “Montreal Manifesto.” AIDS Activist History Project, June 1989. https://aidsactivisthistory.omeka.net/items/show/67.
[14] Policing the Pandemic Report, “We Can’t Police Our Way Out of the Pandemic,” August 2020, https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:f4a8f4cb-39b3-43ba-8a74-f0d760722cb1#pageNum=1. Also see the Policing the Pandemic Mapping Project (website), https://www.policingthepandemic.ca and Scholar Strike Canada, “Policing the Pandemic,” March 22, 2022 at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCyAJID17qE&list=PLLgNT2J7mKzktKITuVhv465TYbYDG9XTQ&index=7
[15] See Suzanne Hindmarch, Michael Orsini, and Marilou Gagnon, eds. Seeing Red: HIV/AIDS and Public Policy in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018; and Alexander McClelland, The Criminalization of HIV in Canada: Experiences of People Living with HIV. Montreal: 2019. https://www.alexandermcclelland.ca/blog-1/2019/11/21/the-criminalization-of-hiv-in-canada-experiences-of-people-living-with-hiv.
[16] See Susan Ferguson, ‘Life Making or Death Making?” Midnight Sun , 10, 17, 2021 at: https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/life-making-or-death-making/
[17] See Daniel Sarah Karasik, “Suppress the Virus Now!” Briarpatch, November 8, 2020, https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/suppress-the-virus-now.
[18] .Raia Small, “Why Has the Left Deprioritized COVID?” https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/why-has-the-left-deprioritized-covid/
[19] Alan Sears, “Health From Below in a Global Pandemic,” New Socialist, April 24, 2020,https://newsocialist.org/health-from-below-in-a-global-pandemic/
[20] See Gary Kinsman, “Silence=Death, Action=Life: New Relevance in COVID Pandemic Times,” Radical Noise, April 6, 2021 at: https://radicalnoise.ca/2021/04/06/silencedeath-action-life-new-relevance-in-covid-pandemic-times/