Coronavirus: The Pandemic and The Seven Sins

A perspective on the pandemic written by Robert Sember and Mindy Thompson Fullilove, March 22, 2020. 

On October 20, 2019, Rev. Dr. William Barber II delivered a homily at Riverside Church in observance of the 400th anniversary of the first Africans arriving at Jamestown to be sold into bondage.  His sermon, entitled “Stolen Hands, Stolen Lands,” enacted a trial of the United States  (you can find a transcript of the sermon here).  He presented the following seven charges, or sins, that America had committed as it sought to justify slavery and prevent the eradication of its harms: bad biology, sick sociology, political pathology, corruptible courts, evil economics, militia madness, and heretical ontology.  His explication of the historical appearance of these actions provided a sound basis for linking the harms of slavery to the crisis of the coronavirus pandemic now sweeping the world.  As the pandemic hits America, we believe that the seven sins are titling us toward worse case scenarios. These need to be understood and fought by a moral fusion coalition.  

The novel coronavirus, COVID19, was identified December 31, 2019, as the cause of a new upper respiratory illness, characterized by cough, fever, and shortness of breath.  As cases accumulated, it became clear that the illness was highly infectious and deadly, causing respiratory distress.  The initial outbreak in Wuhan, China, was briefly hidden by the government, but as cases and deaths mounted the nation instituted population-level quarantine, eventually affecting 750 million people.  The nation sent supplies and health care workers to Wuhan and its surrounding province, which was most severely affected.  New hospitals were built in as little as two days, providing space for the care of those who could not remain at home.  Clinicians and other scientists worked around the clock to describe the virus, including sequencing its genome and immediately sharing this information with the world (including the CDC in the USA), and describing the clinical features of the disease and the outcomes for the first hundreds of patients.  These efforts helped to contain the epidemic: at the time of this writing, only a few new cases were being reported. As of March 22, 2020, China had experienced 81,093 cases and 3,270 deaths.  

As the rest of the world watched this unfold, societies took different steps in their response.  South Korea identified its first case in mid-January and immediately instituted a full array of public health measures, including widespread testing, contact tracing and population-level quarantine for hot spots, effectively containing the epidemic to one city.  Italy was slower to respond, and was quickly overwhelmed: the number of deaths there from coronavirus surpassed those in China on March 19, 2020.  

The United States also had its first case in January. More like Italy than South Korea, the US made minimal use of the early days of the epidemic to prepare effectively.  In particular, the US bungled early efforts at disseminating tests for the virus, making it impossible to deploy much of the rest of the epidemic control tool kit.  Cases spread, following the classic geography of hierarchical diffusion, spatial contagion and network diffusion.  President Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that the epidemic was not a problem, praised himself and his administration for their successes, and declared that, like the flu, it would disappear with warmer weather.  Thus his administration dallied while infection spread silently and exponentially, by March 15th reaching the point of inflection at which the number of cases began to shoot up and those with advanced infection to overwhelm the hospitals.  As of this writing there were 22,000 known cases in the United States, but, because of the failure to implement widespread testing, there are probably 10 times that number, or 220,000.  Models suggest that we may see 2.2 million infections in the weeks to come.  

We turn from this short history to examine the ways in which Reverend Barber’s iteration of America’s seven sins reveals how we come to be on this terrible path of excess death, economic distress and loss of faith in government. To illustrate the concepts, we have selected examples of each of the seven sins; there are many others that could be included in this list.

1. As evidence of bad biology we have a litany of denials, distractions, falsehoods, and arrogant magical thinking that led the CDC to turn down the WHO’s offer to provide test kits, only to find that its self-designed tests were faulty.  The resulting delay hampered public health workers’s efforts to develop an accurate map of where and how infections were growing locally, regionally, and nationally.  This bad biology continues in the failure of the federal government to implement, in a timely manner, the full panoply of public health containment efforts.  Then, prematurely thrust into the mitigation phase of the epidemic, we faced and continue to face equivocation regarding the production and distribution of PPE and ventilators and the building of temporary hospitals. Reports suggest that the administration is more interested in adhering to its “small government” and “free market” ideology than using the resources at its disposal.  Instead, we are offered the promise of treatments, even cures, that lack the evidence-base to support such claims.  Testing potential therapies and vaccines is essential but premature, exaggerated, and unfounded claims of efficacy is not helpful.  Equivocation fuels ambivalence and confusion.  This contributes to the “don’t worry and carry on” attitude some are practicing as they ignore calls for social distancing and gather for recreation and worship.

2. The formulation, “China Virus,” is subjecting us to yet another episode in this administration’s spectacle of othering.  By casting an entire nation or population as the cause of the epidemic, the president and his apologists have dashed weeks of efforts by local officials to combat anti-Chinese racism and the falsehoods upon which those ideas and practices rest.  This sick sociology will surely make us sicker in body, in spirit, and in community.  Thus, in addition to addressing the legitimate challenges of this moment, we also have to deal with these efforts to blame the epidemic away and set peoples against one another.  

3. As indicated above, a political pathology fuels bad biology, sick sociology, and the other structures named by Rev. Barber.  This crisis underscores the costs of the political calculus underlying attacks on the Affordable Care Act and related efforts to extend medical care to all in this country.  Conservative forces are exploiting this crisis to further diminish women's reproductive rights by designating abortions "elective" and, therefore "nonessential" surgical procedures that must be delayed.  This administration’s budget proposals have also repeatedly included sizeable cuts to the CDC (The CDC’s staff has decreased by 591 positions, or 5.4%, from December 2016 through March 2019) and NIH, and then there is the confusion and lack of knowledge in the executive branch regarding whether and how the directorate for global health security and biodefense on the National Security Council (NSC) was either eliminated or reorganized.  The Obama administration established this position in response to the Ebola crisis wake-up call.  The debates regarding what actually happened to this position underscore a basic lack of planning and preparedness.  And, we see political pathology in the emerging stories of how certain politicians used their insider knowledge to leverage their own profiteering by claiming that the crisis was not a crisis while selling off their investments ahead of the inevitable plummet in the stock market.

4. Contestations regarding the responsibilities and accountability of the state can be arbitrated by the courts.  The current administration has been very clear, however, that this is not its understanding of the function of the courts, which it is aggressively populating with ideological purists.  Corruptible courts are more likely to obey than dissent.  And so, under the guise of this crisis, while other arms of the justice department work to promote social distancing and other practices that will help curtail and eventually end this crisis, immigration and deportation hearings continue.  The crisis is already being used to heighten border restrictions and to restrict asylum claims.  Reports are also emerging that while the administration is not using its vast emergency powers to accelerate production and distribution of essential emergency equipment--devolving those responsibilities to the atomized albeit well meaning efforts of the private sector and already overburdened state governments--it is keen to use the crisis to push for controversial policy changes, including the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies.

5. The economy is heading for recession, and here we show how this is linked to evil economics.  Millions are facing unemployment and production and consumption flows are severely curtailed.  The path plotted by politicians, industry, and corporations as the way through this will reveal what is considered the country’s priority.  While a proposed corporate tax cut promises to compound income inequality, this crisis has afforded us the opportunity to elevate consideration of long-standing economic crises that have either been continually ignored or deferred: homelessness, a growing part-time and, therefore, precarious workforce, real estate speculation, student loan debt, rising rents as a result of national corporate consolidation of rental properties, food insecurity, digital divides, etc.  The culture of greed and exploitation is endemic to our society as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of people who took it upon themselves to hoard hand sanitizer, masks, and other supplies or to market counterfeit products so that they could use fear and panic to coerce consumers to pay exorbitantly inflated prices.  Similarly with the hoarding of food by those who have the disposable income and “me first” inclinations to do so.  The images of revelers permitted to celebrate spring break on the beaches of Florida at risk of spreading infection further throughout the nation was another sign of evil economics.

We also see evil economics at play in the vastly skewed value we place on labor in our society: the service workers that are now cleaning, driving buses and trains, delivering mail and packages, and stocking shelves struggle to make ends meet at the best of times and usually only do so by working more than one job. 

6. Violence is a time honored strategy for dealing with a crisis.  Militia madness is what lies behind racist maneuvers, such as intentionally referring to the Novel Coronavirus or COVID-19 as the “China Virus.”  Violence is done when the number of people incarcerated in prisons that are often already beyond capacity is not reduced, and when individuals and families continue to be detained and deported.  We enter this crisis as a country that is deeply and violently divided. Our militia madness ensures that many are excessively armed and will be ready, as they have been in the past, to act to preserve the power and privilege of the few.  Gun manufacturers and gun merchants are thriving in this crisis as people purchase new and additional weapons and stock up on ammunition convinced that things will get so bad that only the violent will come through.  Given the history of this militia madness it is hard not to think that this fear may be a wish.

7. In Rev. Barber’s review of the history of inequality, heretical ontology, the notion that inequality is at the very heart of our nation, functions as the system’s bedrock and its blueprint.  To succumb to heretical ontology is the greatest defeat of all for it means that we both accept and collude in the production and enforcing of inequality.  This belief blinds us to other ways of being and relating to others, including the realization that we are all in this together, that as we act to protect others we are protecting ourselves.  To manifest the tenderness imminent in shared vulnerability means that we affirm that everyone is worthy, valuable, and deserving.  Inequality, such as the assumption that extraordinary measures are not required to protect homeless men and women from the risks of infection, is heretical, a betrayal of our shared life.  Medical professionals are going to find themselves in fiercely difficult situations in the coming weeks as they determine how best to use limited resources.  They will likely be accused of rationing care when, in fact, it is actually the existing rationing of inequality managed through bad biology, sick sociology, political pathology, corruptible courts, and evil economics that undergirds this all.  

We outline this analysis in the spirit with which Rev. Barber presented his sermon on the seven charges against the United States on October 20, 2019.  He framed this call to account for the legacy of slavery and settler colonialism as an opportunity for “learning from the sins of the past so that we might embrace a better future.”  This current crisis is another opportunity to take up this work.  Indeed, the word “crisis” is derived from the Greek word “krisis,” used to name that "turning point in a disease" when a patient could get better or worse.  It's a critical moment.  As we work to prevent illness, care for and heal those who are ill, accompany with compassion and mourn those who do not survive, so must we attend to the social ills of inequality that shape this time of crisis.  This is a political “turning point” and a “critical moment” for justice.  

Rev. Barber foreshadows this juncture by punctuating his review of the history of racist ideologies and practices with James Baldwin’s incontrovertible challenge: “We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over again.”  In this period of crisis, we confront a most American of paradoxes: our deeply exercised capacity for, on the one hand, discrimination, exclusion, privilege, and dehumanization--we are not, as some in power claim, “all in this together”--and, on the other, the spirit of justice, equity, emancipation, and horizontalism--indeed we are “all in this together” if our intention is our collective wellbeing.  Within this paradox lie crucial questions of spirit and being, existential questions, questions of community and society.  We have an opportunity to look at who we are and to envision who we might become.  “I am committed to working with you all to build a moral fusion coalition in the 21st century,” declared Rev. Barber as he concluded his sermon.  Then he asked: “Is there anybody else in here ready to build?”