Pandemics and their accelerants The Human Disease: How We Create Pandemics, from Our Bodies to Our Beliefs Sabrina Sholts MIT Press, 2024. 352 pp.

SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

After having circulated among birds and wild mammals across the globe for more than a year, a virus is reported to have spilled over into domesticated animals, and at least one human has been infected (1). Given the scant media coverage of these events, the reader may be forgiven for assuming that I have access to a time machine, allowing me to travel back to December 2019, on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, the date is 5 April 2024, the virus is H5N1 (an avian influenza), and the infected animals are located not in a Chinese wet market but in US dairy farms.

With the world still reeling from the effects of COVID-19, the general apathy toward a rapidly spreading panzootic of a highly pathogenic influenza virus is perplexing. How are we to make sense of our “pandemic blindness,” to adapt a term coined by the philosopher Günther Anders (2) in his critique of nuclear warfare? Reading Sabrina Sholts’s The Human Disease, one glimpses a timely opportunity not just for a sober account of the COVID-19 pandemic but also for an illumination of the ways in which we approach, or indeed fail to approach, pandemics in their biosocial and historical complexity. If the opportunity is only glimpsed, rather than fully realized, this is due to what appears to be an effort for the book to remain uncontroversial. The Human Disease nonetheless provides a well-researched and balanced discussion of the biological and social drivers of pandemics and of the social responses to anti-epidemic measures.

Despite appearing uninterested in sociocultural anthropology’s flourishing engagement with epidemics, Sholts puts to work the discipline’s key method of rendering the familiar strange and the strange familiar. By so doing, she provides illuminating and enriching insights on thorny social phenomena, such as anti-vaccination and lab-leak complotism.

In turn, histories of epidemics are for the most part woven into the discussion of COVID-19 in a manner that avoids facile continuities or narratives of science’s unstoppable progress. This is unusual for a book aimed at a broad audience and sets Sholts’s account apart from the banalities and misuses of history that have become so common in response to the pandemic.

What is crucially missing from Sholts’s book, however, is a proper accounting of the historical processes that foster pandemics, be they colonialism or, more recently, neoliberal capitalism. Instead, she employs as an overarching explanatory mechanism the notion of the “human” as a key factor in the propagation of infectious disease outbreaks. This is invoked so frequently and on so many different, unmarked registers across the book that it soon sheds any analytical meaning. By the end, one is left with a confident albeit vague sense of a consensus that “humans cause pandemics” and that humans can also prevent them from emerging—if we could only live up to our humanity, that is.

Here is a thought experiment: What conclusions would be drawn from the same well-sourced and well-researched material presented in The Human Disease if 21st-century epidemics and pandemics were approached not as “the human disease” but as “the capitalism disease”? Historians have long engaged in debate about the global epidemiological impact of capitalism, yet the word appears only once in the book (under the bizarre guise of “capitalistic”), and neo-liberalism—its current form—never. This is a conspicuous absence, particularly when Sholts discusses industrial poultry farms and their epidemiological impacts. Is this because the political economic setting of COVID-19 is taken so much for granted that it is impossible to even call it by name?

Whereas the Anthropocene is a helpful framework for expanding our understanding of planetary, multispecies, and environmental aspects of pandemics, its use in lieu of, rather than in addition to, a robust political economic analysis obfuscates crucial questions of pandemic responsibility. Undoubtedly, considering pandemics in terms of political economy would have led to controversy, something the book meticulously avoids. Yet, if we are to overcome our “pandemic blindness,” we need to become radically unsettled by the overarching systems in which diseases play out. Critical perspectives, stemming from decades of research in the humanities and social sciences, can and should play a key role in shaping our questions about epidemics and pandemics.

Future historians may read The Human Disease and consider its place within the lucrative output of books devoted to COVID-19. Will they see it as a coherent effort to break the wave of conspiracy-theory and anti-science obscurantism? Or will they be more harsh and point out that, while indeed offering this important perspective, the book did not pay enough attention to the political economic conditions that foster both pandemics and pandemic denialism? Only time will tell.

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Update: Human infection with highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N1) virus in Texas,” 5 April 2024; http://www.cdc.gov/ncird/whats-new/human-infection-H5N1-bird-flu.html.

• 2. G. Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen Band 1 (C.H. Beck, 2002).
• 10.1126/science.ado3527

The Human Disease: How We Create Pandemics, from Our Bodies to Our Beliefs

Sabrina Sholts MIT Press, 2024. 352 pp.

PHOTO (COLOR): Behaviors affect disease spread. But larger social systems are also to blame.

PHOTO (COLOR)