When you clumsily try to verbalize your thoughts for years and suddenly come across a thinker who has said all the same and more, and mainly much better, already in May 2020. I am both bemused and delighted 😜 Yet again the proof that more multi- and interdisciplinarity would be tremendously useful. Who would have thought that medical anthropology and communist history have so much in common? Truly brilliant stuff. @ccaduff "This is not the “first modern pandemic,” as Bill Gates suggested, but the second neoliberal pandemic, the first one being HIV/AIDS under Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s. It’s a neoliberal pandemic because you can see that in the most neoliberalized countries in the world, the United States and the United Kingdom, significantly more people have died due to COVID-19. And it’s precisely due to the kind of fragile health-care infrastructures and sidelining of public health that neoliberal policies have created. Italy’s northern regions is another case in point, in addition to Brazil. Bolsonaro has made it very clear that he cares about power, but not about the pandemic. It’s also a neoliberal pandemic because of precisely what you were saying: because of the idea that citizens need to be responsible; it’s your duty to protect yourself and society at large; it’s not the state’s duty to provide protection. Suddenly, citizens were asked to stay at home and protect the health-care system (the NHS in the United Kingdom). It wasn’t the health-care system that’s protecting citizens. This just shows how fragility is being normalized, how negative effects are redistributed to the margins, how accountability is displaced and deferred, and how a logic of public sacrifice is mobilized in a nationalistic discourse. The kind of responsabilization that’s been at the center of neoliberal policies for the last two decades has been very strong. Neoliberal defunding made health-care systems so fragile that citizens now need to protect it from falling apart during a pandemic. And all of this is accompanied by nationalist sentiments with people engaging in symbolic clapping to support “corona warriors.” The aim of all of this is to obscure political questions about structural vulnerability and democratic accountability. The idea of the dangerous virus as an external biological threat is politically very useful. ... The lockdown is a political mechanism for the redistribution of negative effects. It moves negative effects away from spaces of public attention to spaces where those effects are less visible. This is how the state reclaims its legitimacy and escapes accountability."