This is a segment of episode 309 of Last Born In The Wilderness “An Abandonment Of An Abandonment: Public Health At The End Of Empire w/ Rob Wallace.” Listen to the full episode: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/rob-wallace

Learn more about Pandemic Research for the People (PReP): https://www.prepthepeople.net

Rob Wallace — evolutionary epidemiologist, agroecologist, and author of ‘Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19’ — joins me to discuss the complex interplay between the increase of infectious pathogens globally, the role of epidemiology within the neoliberal capitalist project, agribusiness and ecological destruction, and Empire at the end of the "cycle of accumulation" in late stage capitalism.

Zootonic pathogen spillover into human populations is on the upward trend. The high-speed evisceration of the last remaining intact biodiverse regions on the planet, in conjunction with agribusiness’s rapacious exploitation of biological life, meets the conditions for highly contagious viruses to evolve and leap from animal to human hosts more successfully and frequently. Regarding this epidemiological reality, Rob Wallace is an archetypal Cassandra, having predicted a pandemic emerging under current conditions as only a matter of time. As we know all know, he was right. SARS-CoV-2 emerged at the very end of 2019 in Wuhan, China, and over the course of almost two years, has killed millions of human beings as it continues to mutate and burn its way through the global population, disrupting practically every governing system of human life in the process. We have entered into an age of pandemics. Unless a massive shift occurs in the global economic order (be it systemic collapse or revolution, you pick), the idea of a global pandemic only occurring every 100 years or so, and not every one to two decades (or less), would be delusional.

Rob Wallace is an agroecologist, economic geographer and evolutionary epidemiologist at the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps in St Paul. He is author of ‘Big Farms Make Big Flu’ and the recently published ‘Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19.’ He has consulted for the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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