Pondering The Plague in a Pandemic

Courtesy: Fine Art America

Padmaja Challakere

The action of fear is to claim more fear, and a world made of fear is a world made of lies . . . . Do not let it sing. Do not dance to fear. Do not sing along with it. Do not pretend it is your ally.–Paul Selig: The Book of Truth

“Obviously, the abscesses had to be lanced. Two criss- cross strokes; the ganglion disgorged a mixture of blood and pus. Their limbs stretched out as far as they could manage, the sick man went on bleeding  . . . . Dark patches appeared on their legs and stomachs; sometimes a ganglion would stop suppurating, then suddenly swell again. Usually the sick man died in a stench of corruption. . . . Some words came back to the doctor’s mind . . .  symptoms given in the medical handbook: The ‘ pulse becomes fluttering, dicrotic, intermittent,’ the patient’s life hung on a  thread, and three people out of four were too impatient not to make the very slight movement that snapped the thread.” —Albert Camus, The Plague

Occasionally, the COVID virus can cause severe problems. This happens when it moves down the respiratory tract and infects the lungs, which are even richer in cells with Ace-2 receptors. Many of these cells are destroyed, and lungs become congested with bits of broken cell. Even worse, in some cases, a person’s immune system goes into overdrive, attracting cells to the lungs in order to attack the virus, resulting in inflammation. This is known as a cytokine storm. (In Greek, “cyto” means cell and “kino” means movement. Just why cytokine storms occur in some patients but not in the vast majority is unclear. One possibility is that some people have versions of Ace-2 receptors that are slightly more vulnerable to attacks from the coronavirus than are those of most people.

-What the Scientists Learned about the Coronavirus, The Guardian, April 24, 2020

N

o end in sight.  Can it really be so long ago? The frantic routine of normal life that we agree to everyday, no matter how strong our doubts, all gone in a poof of fiery red particles! It has actually happened-the catastrophe–a global pandemic– the portents of which were in the air for a decade or more. COVID pandemic. Now, fear pandemic. Two hundred and eighteen thousand dead worldwide. 50,266 dead in the US., according to the world-o–meter. The CDC (Center for Disease Control)  has just revised the number of COVID-19 deaths in the US to 37, 808.

This essay is not a dispatch from the frontlines of the war on the COVID-19 virus. It is about reading Camus’s The Plague in the middle of COVID lockdown. But before I go into the metaphorical, I will go into the polemics of the COVID lockdown in the US that also link with Camus’s novel: self-serving lies, human passivity, and a fear-based routine that brings down the nemesis of the plague. The novel, The Plague, places the reader in the French port town of Algeria, Oran where people occupy themselves by “doing business,” “cultivating habits,” and ultimately “going to sleep,” a place where people “do not believe in pestilences” and “fancy themselves free” (p.4 The Plague). The people of Oran, like us, are ensconced in routine. It is, Camus’ narrator says, “a town of no intimations” so settled in its vanity that “it has even turned its back to the sea.” If these lines capture a moment in our lives today, might not we then read  the COVID predicament metaphorically through the lens of Camus’s use of the plague language in what is undoubtedly one of the great novels of the 20th century?

Much of the world is still in lockdown even though we are told that the  curve is bending, and the number of new infections has been flattening in the last 2 weeks. The recent Stanford Antibody Study states that the overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19 now.

Economy in ruins. Incomes. Jobs lost. People cannot pay their bills. Local small businesses are not sure they can reopen again. If they do, they will be taken over by big businesses that have access to tax-money and the COVID Stimulus bailout. No one is tracking the number of people who are going to die from the meltdown of the economy.

Twenty five million people unemployed in 5 weeks in the US. In India, this number might run to tens of millions. Against India’s 1.373 dead, the US has 50, 266 deaths  attributed to Coronavirus. The statistics are baffling: New York City alone has 11, 000 COVID deaths, 250 times that of Tokyo’s-the densest city in the world- which has had 93 deaths so far. Yes, it might be because the New York Subway system remains open, but so does Tokyo’s, and Tokyo has no lockdown. 70% of the COVID cases in Chicago are African-Americans, given their higher rates of hyper-tension and diabetes cardio-vascular disease. In India, the stringent lockdown is perhaps called for because 6 feet between people is rare.  Safe-distancing, on the other hand,  is not a logistical challenge in the US outside of NYC, as there is 6 feet of separation available between people. Now, there are “Open-Up America” protests in California, Michigan, Florida, Texas, Minnesota to say that indefinite quarantine is not a solution. Panic. Confusion and anxiety. Now, anger.

Broadly speaking, in human history, the human immune system has experienced  the bubonic plague (plaga in Latin meaning a blow) wiping out half of China’s and a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century) and claiming 6 million Indians in the 19th century, then TB or  tuberculosis (spreading from one tiny particle of cough to consume the lungs), Cholera, Shigella Flexneri in 2003 (causing intestinal infections in 3 million children in Africa); and of the  viral variety, SARS (2003), H1N1 (2009) or Swine flu, Ebola  (2014), the Dengue and the Zika virus ( 2015), and last but not the least, the common flu, that according to the CDC (Center for Disease Control) claims 62,000 deaths a year.

What is uncanny about COVID-19 is its newness. It is “a new virus of the kind not previously experienced by human beings,” as my doctor friend in Nottingham told me. What is even more uncanny about COVID, medically speaking, is the way in which it ‘drives the immune system into an overreaction, sending out anti-inflammatory particles’ that choke the lungs and de-oxygenate the blood. If stultifying passivity was Camus’s metaphor for the plague, overreaction as fear expanded can be seen as the metaphor for COVID 2020. Maybe, overreaction is our form of passivity.

The inundation of COVID data, and of news-clips and models and projections replicate the pathogen’s skills of transmission, collusion, mimicry and trickery. In this context, taking the facts as a point of departure and thinking metaphorically might be helpful. It could give us access to a fourth dimension, a metaphorical and imaginative dimension of death and loss.

Is COVID-19 conceivable as a metaphor? What might that look like?  I am no poet. But what can be some imaginative metaphors for this virus:  Locusts? A poisoned whirlwind? Wings of darkness suffocating our breath?

Maybe, William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Road to the Contagious Hospital” can be of service to us here: “By the road to the contagious hospital/under the surge of the blue/mottled clouds driven from the northeast, a cold wind moved in.” Certainly, a cold polluting wind did move in from the Wuhan Seafood market on or about Dec 10th, 2019; or, possibly the wind moved in from a different source-the P4 lab in the Wuhan Institute of Virology where research was being done on Coronavirus–an enervating wind that sucked the air of out the lungs of tens of thousands of people in China and the world over.

The P4 lab in Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to this Epoch Times video titled The Origin of the Wuhan Virus was the site of research on Coronavirus similar to the SARs bat-related virus of 2012. Shi Zeingli of the P4 lab had successfully isolated 3 viruses from bats, one of which had an S protein that successfully integrated into human cells creating, in effect, a new virus “that would grow remarkably well in human-cells by binding with the ACE-2 enzymes in the human lungs” and infect human beings without needing the animal intermediary, and these results were published in the authoritative Science journal Nature in Oct 2013 by Shi Zengli.

This is not new information; the human-to-human transmissibility of a pandemic-causing virus has been known for a long time but this information was not shared either by the Chinese Government or by WHO. Why are risky experiments with deadly viruses that can cause a global pandemic conducted? Why, after the outbreak of lethal pneumonia in Wuhan, has the P-4 lab been closed? It does not help that the databases and information at the Wuhan P4 lab are closed for inspection and censored by the Chinese authorities, while the official CCP narrative and international media have shifted public attention to the South China Wuhan sea-food market as Ground Zero of COVID, which, as it turns out, sold no bats.

This video, too loud with truth for Facebook’s fact-checkers, is worth watching because it tells the story of the unaccountable power and institutionalization of globally-funded bio-medical research lavishly funded, with no accountability to public safety and public health. The ways in which power entrenches itself in global institutions and how corruption prospers these institutions is too well-known. Maybe, people will not stand with  global NGO cover-stories anymore because; like it or not, COVID-19 is going to usher in economic nationalism.

The Lockdown  and the American-Poor

It is impossible to ignore that the brunt of this pandemic is being borne by the poor across the world but the working-class Americans who oppose the lockdown in the US as a calamitous public policy are made to feel they are against humanity. The American poor–never much a subject of discussion except for contempt–have been disproportionately affected by the lockdown and COVID unemployment. They have lost their jobs, their income, are running out of food, and  there is not a chance that Hollywood is going to raise 150 million for them. They have been seen standing for hours outside food pantries, and the city-services are squeezed between surging demand and short-supplies.

And, now they are protesting in cities across the nation asking questions that demand consideration: Is an extended economic lockdown to be expected for the next virus?  Where are the numbers for those who are healthy and have gotten COVID-19? Why does the media not report the number of people who recover from COVID? If this virus is as lethal as it is claimed, why, they ask, is Fauci who is 80, and why are all the aged authorities and experts on media hobnobbing with millenials, and out and about unmasked with no six feet separation?  If the virus is so deadly, why are not essential workers dying in thousands? And, where are the homeless, with their thousand pre-existing comorbidities, catching their (un)certified COVID deaths?

Those with no-jobs whose survival is at stake would rather risk the virus over guaranteed poverty after 2 months of no income,  and their placards say: “Open Up America” We’ll Take Our Chances.” “You elected officials are pissing on our heads, Don’t tell me it’s raining.” The average American is uninsured, and has zero reason to trust either the media or the medical establishment with its expensive crisis-medicine model, which far from being a useful or an equitable public resource, is of no use for public health, given that  fast-food and prescription-painkillers, and psychotropic drugs  have already done their work  in creating the world’s most unhealthy population in a first-world nation.

The idea that the COVID lockdown is hell on the poor is not an accepted idea among the middle-class who trust the authorities and experts and the opinions that the media trundles up whose job is to regulate fear. For the protestors, the lockdown is another exercise of authoritarianism:  global liberal- totalitarianism trampling on their livelihoods and rights, and the increasingly unaccountable power of politicians.

The polemical battle-lines are clearly drawn: on the comfortable side of the lockdown are the telecommuting middle-class people in their homes, under house-arrest, building new routines of Zooming, Zooking, Scrabble, running, and Netflixing. Those who can wipe, do. Everything that comes into the house gets the Lysol wipe. They are shocked by the protestors, and this is their brief against the protestors: “we are making sacrifices by staying at home,” “hand-washing,” “safe-distancing,” and your rights are not going to the cause of “overwhelming the medical system and putting us at risk”.

Despite the dance of agreements and disagreements, the elites and the middle-class use the media as a ring of protection to hold on to the privilege of  never feeling the need to check a transcript or a tweet against the media or the newspaper’s account, and  the media speaks to and for them fulsomely. The middle class’ unquestioning trust of medical authorities and media is the real basis of their support of the lockdown. The Government and pharmacy-anointed contradictions to protect profits and power do not matter.  The US media, always a dab hand, at closing down any but the shallowest of interpretations, is quick with labels: the people questioning the economic lockdown are ‘COVID Deniers’ and ‘COVID Skeptics’ just like “Anti-Vaxxers” or “Holocaust Deniers.” While COVID-19 is a world-wide public-health crisis, it is fundamentally a political, economic, media crisis, looking to harness, manipulate, and push a mandatory medical regime of control. The middle class unquestioning trust of medical authorities and media is the real basis of their support of the lockdown. The Government and pharmacy-anointed contradictions to protect profits and power do not matter.

The Bio-Medical

The microbiology of how the virus is transmitted is so entrancing and exerts such fascination, that simpler questions about ‘what sections of  the population are most affected’ are not fully explored.  Yes, we know that people above 75 years of age and immunocompromised patients in nursing homes, old-age homes, and assisted-care facilities  account for a significant percentage of COVID fatalities, except in New York City, which alone accounts for one-third the US fatalities.  While there is an inundation of stories about how the virus transmits, there are no projections about ‘what are the chances of transmission’? What can we do to defend against the virus?  We are under the sway of a biomedical paradigm of the virus and the vaccine, the waging an endless war on the virus.

The CDC (Center for Disease Control) has issued no immune health advice. Only one prescribed order: ‘Wait for the Vaccine.’ Because fear is convenient. Because fear can be taken to the market. Fear can be used to enforce control with complete disregard for people’s rights.

So, it makes sense that the pandemic expert most seen on TV is billionaire Bill Gates playing the role of the doctor, epidemiologist, Head of State, and WHO spokesman rolled into one saying that the only way that we will come out of this pandemic is to create and mandate a global vaccine, and, yes, while we are at it, also Immunity Passports for work and travel, and in consonance with Silicon Valley and Google, also Face Recognition Software and the Biometric Vaccine Imprint. The influence of the Bill Gates and Melinda Gates Foundation in steering WHO’s mandate towards an exclusively vaccine program is well known, but Bill Gates is an idol for the middle-class, and for all the people who work in institutions controlled by the Foundation. For the medical establishment in the US and the global Big Pharma, and for the Technocrats in Silicon Valley and beyond, there is only one solution and that is the vaccine: lucrative and mandatory. Gilead Pharmaceuticals that partners with Wuxi Pharma Tech Inc. owned by Soros will be making the vaccine Remdesivir, given an emergency authorization for use, with big profits for Bill Gates, Dr. Fauci, and George Soros.

Questions are being raised about the inflated mortality rates by the CDC (Center for Disease Control and WHO. The state of  Pennsylvania on April 24th, 2020 had to remove  200 deaths from official coronavirus count.  Most of the deaths in California, and the rest of the nation, have been at nursing homes or assisted living homes. But in New York, according to the Washington Times, people as young as 30-40 are dying, and  showing symptoms not just of lung collapse but of heart-attacks and kidney failure. In what remains of America, outside of New York,  the death toll amounts to 7.5 per hundred thousand, according to NYTimes Opinion Piece (April 24, 2020) entitled  “A National Lockdown is Bad Medicine and Worse Politics.” If you are under the age of 65, if you live outside New York, or a nursing home, your chance of dying from COVID is 0.03%.

Media Information War vs. Public Health

If the media was in alignment with the population, there would be, as there has been in India, some useful immune health advice for a terrified population experiencing forced social isolation, anxiety, stress, and from that alone, a suppressed immune system. It is an information war, and the media no longer even hides the fact that it suppresses any alternative viewpoint than that of the US medical establishment and the CDC. Twitter and YouTube ban videos that provide immune health advice about Vitamin D and Vitamin C and UV light as defense against COVID, raising the question: do they want people to stay sick? Dr. Shiva Ayadurrai, who is running for Senate in Massachusetts is the only one who is putting out daily videos about a healthy immune-system.

You will not find these videos on Google but they are worth a watch for their knowledge-dissemination about immune system health and for their views revelations about the medical establishment being radically at odds with public health and  wellness. Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai’s recommendations seem obvious enough and uncontroversial: “strengthen your immune system.” Attempts to speak about therapeutic cures like Vitamin D and high doses of Vitamin C, are discredited or censored. On April 24, 2020 a medical facility, Allure Medical Hospital in the Shelby township of Michigan saw an FBI raid for endangering patients by using a therapeutic high dose of Vitamin C. Twitter and YouTube have been deleting videos  about supplements-based therapeutic treatments asserting “they go against their community guidelines.” MSNBC found it necessary to cut into the Presidential briefing about Hydroxychloroquine and Zinc being helpful in early-stage fight against Coronavirus to show a doctor vociferously denying this “mystifying claim” about an anti-malarial drug that oddly Dr. Fauci himself had recommended in 2012 against SARS: “Nothing  in the Spe Vitamins aisle can help you.” If COVID is a public health crisis that is endangering lives, a healthy immune-system is certainly not part of the medical establishment or the media’s solution.

Benn Schwann of Truth and Media points out that the “flawed  mathematical models that had predicted  that two million people in the US would die if nothing was done, and 200, 000 people would die even if social distancing was maintained have now been adjusted three times since April 2 and scaled back  to reflect the far lower mortality rates. But they still drive the fear and the policy decisions.

Two key medical institutions that created the mathematical projections about  2 million people dying in the US if nothing was done, and 200,000 dead in a year even if social distancing is maintained– IHME at University of Washington and Imperial College, London— were both lavishly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

 Reading Camus’ The Plague

Camus’s novel is set in a small North African town of Oran “whose chief interest is commerce” and whose “main business is making money, lots of it, except in the evenings where they foregather at a time that never varies, to stroll the same boulevard, their vices never ranging beyond short-lived passions, bowling, banquets, and Clubs where large sums change hands at the fall of a card” (p.4). Oran is a town that lives in routine, a town that experiences “difficulty— no, discomfort would come nearer– when it comes to caring for the sick.” The invalid, Camus’s narrator says, has no place in the town.” Routine and attachment to routine-a suffocating passivity is what the plague swoops down upon in this novel. At first, the people of Oran turn even the plague into a routine in the first few weeks: a new routine.

Agreement to fear becomes the new routine of what the middle class does best: fretting, being scared, and obedient compliance with the authorities. The doctor in Camus’s novel–Dr. Rieux– is no MD hero, no Humphrey Bogart! Dr. Rieux works tirelessly from morning to night fighting “the plague that was becoming pneumonic,  with most of the  buboes refusing to burst,  and the victims suffering horribly” but he keeps mainly to two beliefs: “there are sick people and they need curing and I am going to defend them the best I can.”

In an age of MD heroes and  our biomedical  paradigm of waging a heroic war on the virus through vaccines, in our world of self-dramatization, self-congratulation and complete domestication of heroism what can the ironic stance of the doctor in Camus’ novel say to us today? About doing our jobs “as they should be done”?

Dr. Riex-the novel’s central character,  rejects individual heroism and seeks help even from the prisoners in the jail to battle the plague.  Camus places Dr. Rieux predominantly in an elegiac rather than a heroic mode. When Tarrou, the journalist, asks him to speak about himself and his profession in the heroic mode, Rieux self-description is modest rather than covert-narcissist:  “I haven’t a notion, Tarrou; I assure you I haven’t a notion.  When I entered this profession, I did it ‘abstractly,’ so to speak, because it meant a career like any other, one that young men often aspire to. Then I had to see people die. Have you ever heard a woman scream “Never” with her last gasp.” Well, I have. I was young then, and I was outraged by the whole scheme of things, or so I thought. Subsequently I grew more modest.”

When Tarrou taunts him, “but your victories will never be final,” Rieux responds with “but that does not mean I should give up the struggle.” The neutrality of Dr. Rieux’s response is a corrective to our age, and animates what are, perhaps, the most famous lines of the book:

What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of the plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you’d need to be a mad man or a coward, or stone-blind to give in tamely to the plague(p126)

Dr. Rieux’s argument is that he is one among a band of people fighting the plague out of “common decency” and his adamant refusal to be portrayed as a hero or feel heroic pride is a far cry away from our world in which the most parsimonious act demands to be acknowledged as heroic.  Dr. Rieux encounters death everywhere, sees the suffering of a child and it breaks him as it breaks his adversary, the Jesuit priest, Father Paneloux.  When at the end of the novel, desperately weary, he sits vigil at the bedside of his best friend’s deathbed, Dr. Rieux knows that the “grim wrestling with the angel of death was to last until dawn, and saw in the blood that spurted under his needle “something more vital than the soul that no human skill to bring to light and that the doctor’s task could be only to watch his friend struggle” (p. 284 ):

“The ganglia had ceased swelling, but they were still there, like lumps of iron embedded in the joints. Rieux decided that lancing them was impracticable. Now and then, in the intervals between bouts of fever and coughing fits, Tarrou still gazed at his friends. But soon his eyes opened less and less often and the glow that shone out from the ravaged face in the brief moments of recognition grew steadily fainter. . . . and now Rieux had before him only a mask like face, inert, from which the smile had gone forever. This human form, his friend’s, lacerated by the spear-thrusts of the plague, consumed by searing, superhuman fires, buffeted by all the raging winds of heaven was foundering under his eyes in the dark flood of the pestilence, and he could do nothing to avert the wreck. He could only stand, unavailing, on the shore, empty handed and sick at heart, unarmed and helpless yet again under the onset of calamity. And thus when the end came, the tears that blinded Rieux’s face were tears of impotence; and he did not see Tarrou roll over, face to the wall, and die with a short, hollow groan as if somewhere within him an essential cord had snapped.” (p.289)

Dr. Rieux’s resolve has to do with re-imagining what it means to be active and respond to the inherent possibilities of the moment of his friend’s unspeakable suffering and painful death. This acceptance of aporia, or at the most obvious level, end-of-life conversations are what doctors today find most difficult to do, as my friend who works in a hospital, pointed out. That is why ventilators have become so significant even though ventilators seem to be failing with the COVID virus since the lungs can be breathing but the bloodstream cannot process the oxygen.

Being stuck within the accepted limits of technology  derives from wanting to avoid being stuck in a situation of extremis described above.

In  his lecture The Plague and Its Metaphors, metaphors,  Rowan Williams speaks about how the metaphor of plague  as nemesis can  speak to us now in a Godless, or rather God-refusing hyper-medicalized world. If  plague is the malice of fate that swoops down from the skies like the eagle, the virus transmits secretly and invisibly.  Camus uses the ancient plague language from Classical Greek tragedy as a metaphor of ‘human passivity in the face of evil.’  As Rowan Williams argues, “the plague language is not as ancient as we want to imagine”, and that  “as the AIDS epidemic reminds us, the language of plague was invoked to identify a culpable element in society, who could be, if not expelled, at least controlled, monitored, corralled, and confined”.

One calls down the plague on one’s head, as the saying goes. The plague’s venom burns, swells, stiffens and burns the body. It is a ruining blow. The retro-virus, the plague of our times, on the other hand, is a clever invisible combatant changing tactics and mutating and tricking the body’s defences against itself.  Imagine being in a strange dance of agreement and disagreement with corruption. Imagine corruption everywhere where you prosper on the basis of corruption, where altruistic institutions are built around corruption and that will illuminate the nature of the virus pathogen whose first move is to find a hiding place in the last place where you would look.

The plague, on the other hand, is an unignorable, unspeakable horrific offence, an offence that needs to be fought at two levels: the one responsible has to be cast out and collective reparations made to negotiate with the offended God. And how can the plague be pushed back? As Williams insists, the casting out of the one responsible is not a matter of blaming and scapegoating.  Fighting the agent responsible for the plague belongs to a whole other register of intensity. It is about the undoing of a certain form of blaming. The key is to recognize in oneself the source of the plague, as Williams shows in his wonderful reading of  Sophocles  Oedipus Rex in his lecture Plague and Its Metaphors:

The tragic irony of Sophocles is that Oedipus will be the divine healer by recognizing that he himself is the source of both the poison and the cure, and he will discover himself as the medicine when he discovers himself as the poison, and that he himself is the one who should be cast out. In the event, the blood is shed by himself in an extraordinary final scene Oedipus tears out his own eyes.  The plague is pushed back when its sources are identified in the tragic hero. This is the subtlety of the tragic irony in Sophocles.

As Williams puts it in his lecture, the force of Camus’ novel is set against passivity in every way Camus’s plague metaphor does not simply refer to the collusion of Occupied France with Nazis. What Camus was seeking to do in the novel was  “precisely NOT to tie  resistance to any particular program or activities but to probe for what it is that motivated or that made sense in the resistance to evil.” The virus of sentimental moralism is what Camus rejects in his novel and shows to us how ill-equipped we are to face death and mourning.

At the crossroad of this change,Paul Selig in his talk Balance in a Storm feels we have a choice to make as human beings not to be a victim of circumstances, not to be fearful. “You are not in fear, he says, until you agree to be fearful.” He asks us to go into “an upper room in ourselves, to accord with the higher self in us, which is neutral and present to things as they are. In this upper room of the self, there is no polarization of good and evil, of fear and rights.” His advice is: “Do not react with the small self. The soul may learn hard lessons but unless it is seen an opportunity to learn we will be claimed by fear instead of being in accord with the divine.”

*********

Notes
--Epigraph from Paul Selig: The Book of Truth. 2017; p 27

Padma Challakere teaches high-school English in St.Paul, MN. She has taught literature and writing in liberal arts colleges in Minnesota for two decades. In the last few years, she has published essays in Counter Punch, The Hindu, The Deccan Herald, and The Wire on topics such as the Afghanistan war novel, Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Kishori Amonkar, V.S Naipaul, and Bret Easton Ellis.

More by this author in The Beacon:

Et tu Brute! Turning Assange into Outcast

“We Know Everything About You!”