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The Costs of Covid

William S. Solomon

The Covid pandemic’s onset prompted speculation that the disease had been created in a lab in China, specifically as a weapon against the United States. This new and highly contagious virus did wreak profound socioeconomic trauma and widespread suffering, borne disproportionately by the disadvantaged. Initially it caused nearly 1.2 million deaths in the United States. But at the pandemic’s onset, the late Dr. Paul Farmer, of Harvard University, offered a different explanation for the virus’s toll:

We are facing the consequences of decades and decades of underinvestment in public health, and of centuries of misallocation of funds away from those who need that help most. All the social pathologies of our nation come to the fore during epidemics. And during a pandemic like this one, we’re going to be showing the rest of the world, warts and all, how…badly we can do.

The “lab leak” theory is fictitious, an attempt to divert attention from the situation that Farmer described, while vilifying an Asian country for geopolitical purposes. It blends ignorance, bigotry and denial with what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” in American politics: “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”

The 19th-century US nativist movements likewise saw their country as being besieged from abroad. Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, warned in 1835 that Austria sought to install a Hapsburg as “Emperor of the United States.” Lyman Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, preached that “a great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions,” had been sent here by “the potentates of Europe.”

The modern far right sees threats within the United States, a land which, in Hofstadter’s words, “they are determined to repossess.” The German American Bund demanded in 1938 that “our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it.” J. Edgar Hoover maintained an FBI file on Eleanor Roosevelt, whose support for civil rights, labor unions, and non-traditional gender roles apparently constituted a threat to national security. The John Birch Society called Dwight Eisenhower “a dedicated Communist,” while today a rising fascist paranoia is voiced by militias and QAnon, among others.

The “lab leak” theory combines these two fears: An external enemy more than seven thousand miles away sent to us a biological assassin. This theory receives respectful treatment in the mainstream U.S. news media, which described the efforts to create a Covid vaccine as a “global arms race.” Still, a connection to Dr. Farmer’s concerns has been made by a retired Navy medical officer, Pietro D. Marghella: “How can threats related to the nation’s public health not be considered threats to national security?” There is historical precedent: During the Boer War, 40 to 60 percent of British military recruits were rejected as physically unfit. Late in the First World War, prime minister Lloyd George concluded: “You cannot maintain an A-1 Empire with a C-3 population.”

More recent developments, such as bioweapons, AIDS, and global warming, have heightened awareness of the “globalized spread of disease risks, be they pathogens, products, or pollutants,” writes David P. Fidler, senior fellow for global health and cybersecurity at the Council on Foreign Relations. Thus, “viewing public health through the lens of security has become an integral aspect of public health governance in the 21st century.”

Yet the last fifty years have seen a steep drop in the number of staffed hospital beds, from 1.5 million to 674,000, and in hospitals, from 7,156 in 1975 to 6,120 in 2022. During the same time, the US population rose from 210 million to 333 million.

Today the federal government and some states have ended aid programs for those struggling with pandemic damage. By April 2024, 20 million people had lost their Medicaid coverage; proposed cuts would remove it from another 15 million people. And since well before the pandemic, “some 45,000 annual deaths [were] associated with a lack of health insurance,” according to the American Journal of Public Health.

All this is despite health researchers’ warnings. Dr. Peter J. Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, notes that “COVID-19 was the third major and serious coronavirus epidemic or pandemic following SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012, thus, we should anticipate a fourth coronavirus outbreak within the next decade or so.” Yet the Trump administration is actively subverting an already profoundly troubled health care system. “Disease cure research in the United States—for cancer, for Alzheimer’s disease, even for pediatric heart defects—has been stopped,” writes Professor Gigi Gronvall of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Early in 2025, $2.7 billion was cut from the NIH and $739 million from the National Science Foundation, Gronvall notes. (The military’s FY 2026 budget is more than $1 trillion, plus $100 billion for intelligence agencies.)

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” Prince Prospero’s populace was being decimated by a plague: “No sickness had ever been so deadly.” Thus, “when half the people of his land had died, he called to him a thousand healthy, happy friends, and with them went far away to live in one of his palaces. This was a large and beautiful stone building he had planned himself. A strong, high wall circled it.” Prospero soon held a lavish masked ball—into which, disguised as a partygoer, the Red Death entered, with grim results. Poe published this story in 1842. More than 180 years later, our current rulers—and their 77.3 million voters—appear to have learned nothing from it.

[William S. Solomon is Professor Emeritus of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He has published essays on media history, the nature of news, and journalism education. He co-edited, with Robert W. McChesney, Ruthless Criticism: New Perspectives in U.S. Communication History (1993). Courtesy: MR Online, a forum for collaboration and communication between radical activists, writers, and scholars around the world, started by Monthly Review, the famed socialist magazine published from New York.]

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Covid-19 was 99% Likely from the US

Jeffrey Sachs interviewed by Fidias Panayiotou

Editor’s Note: On May 3, Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs joined Member of the European Parliament Fidias Panayiotou for a live podcast event titled “The Global Order in Transition.” During the discussion, Professor Sachs revealed that he is actively investigating the true origins of COVID-19 and stated that he is now 99% certain it was manufactured in the United States. The full transcript follows:

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Jeffrey Sachs: I’ll tell you a sad truth, also a little surprising, and I have to admit what I’m about to tell you is only 99% sure. But my view, based on very extensive work over the last four and a half years, is that COVID came from the University of North Carolina, which is the leading researcher on beta coronavirus viruses, working with the US government on a set of grant proposals that identified putting in the viral change that created SARS CoV 2.

It’s a grim truth; it’s ugly, it’s been hidden from view. The reason I mentioned it in this context is we don’t have any global governance that is effective right now to control the manipulation of dangerous pathogens, like the manipulation that created the pandemic.

When it happened—and officially it took 7 million deaths, but probably, if you count all of the deaths associated with COVID, it was probably closer to 20 million deaths—even when that happens, it’s never properly investigated; it’s covered up, it’s hidden from view.

Fidias Panayiotou: This is a big claim, it’s the first time that I hear it. Can you tell us a bit more about this—how and why?

Jeffrey Sachs: Yeah, and I didn’t want to divert, except to say we need global government to keep us alive. Don’t underestimate how much things can get screwed up by dangerous technologies that are not under proper control.

Just a word about this, because honestly, I’ve spent—I don’t know how much time over the last four and a half years—learning from others. I’m not a scientist; I’m a pretty assiduous researcher, but I depend on what the scientists have helped me to understand. But basically, COVID is caused by a virus. The virus is called SARS CoV 2. SARS was the original disease, and SARS CoV 2 is the scientific name of the virus that causes COVID 19 disease.

When you look at the virus, there’s something very odd about it. For two major reasons, it looks like it’s manipulated in the laboratory. Of course that’s not absolutely ironclad to prove—ironclad would be to get the emails, the lab experiments, and the lab notebooks and so forth, which we don’t have because they remain hidden from view—but you can tell from the genetic signature a lot. There are two main parts of the virus that show, “My god, someone was tampering with this kind of virus.”

One of them is four amino acids—and for those of you who remember your biochemistry, that means 12 nucleotides, each three codes for one amino acid. There are four amino acids that are inserted in this virus that don’t appear anywhere else in nature—in this kind, this family of viruses, which is a bat family.

In the research proposals for many years, scientists at the University of North Carolina and some other places had the idea of putting in that sequence to do certain experiments, because they knew that if that sequence is put in—it’s called a furin cleavage site—it makes the virus most likely much more transmissible and dangerous to people. So they were studying that. It was never seen in nature, but the idea was, “Ah, maybe if we put it in, it becomes very dangerous,” and you can find the documents explaining, “That’s the experiment we want to do.”

Now, there’s a lot more that can be said, but the point is, because of people who leaked information, because of the Freedom of Information Act, and because of people who talked, we now have a very good record of what most likely happened—not for sure, but most likely. And what most likely happened is that our government—the US government—funded research to put this furin cleavage site into this virus with the strange idea of creating a vaccine for bats.

What they wanted to do was to have something that could be put into the air in caves in Southeast Asia that the bats would inhale, and then make the bats immune to new infections by these beta coronaviruses. It sounds wild, and it is, but the idea was that American soldiers fight in Southeast Asia and they could get sick from these viruses transmitted by the bats, so we should create vaccines against bats.

Honestly, only the US Department of Defense could come up with this. I’m telling you—it’s not typical; it’s really how the government of the United States operates. So they did these experiments, most likely—again, I’m putting it at 99%—and then they tested it on the bats that the US has in captivity in the government laboratory in Montana.

The virus worked; it was transmitted in the bats. But there was only one problem: the kind of bat that the US has in captivity isn’t the kind of bat in Southeast Asia. In Montana, they’re called Egyptian fruit bats, but the bats in Southeast Asia are called horseshoe bats, or Rhinolophus sinicus—bats in particular in Yunnan Province, China.

Who has those bats in captivity? The Wuhan Institute of Virology. So how about taking this test virus and testing it in the bats in the Wuhan Institute of Virology? You just send it by mail. “Oops. What happened? Oh, did I stick myself? Did I breathe something I shouldn’t have breathed?” There was a lab accident in Wuhan, and the next thing we know, several years later, 20 million dead.

Fidias Panayiotou: So you think the United States did it to harm China?

Jeffrey Sachs: No, the United States did it most likely for the very reason it says in a proposal you can find online—by the way, if you’re really interested in this, it’s called the DEFUSE proposal, submitted to something called DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and you can find it online. It explains what they wanted to do: they wanted to make it safe for American fighters in Southeast Asia, not by harming China, but by protecting bats from infection. Okay, honestly, pretty weird—but when you’re rich, you can do a lot of weird things, and that’s one of the weird things the United States did.

Incidentally, when the virus appeared, the scientists said, “Oh shit, this looks not natural—something bad probably happened.” They said that on February 1st, 2020, in a private phone call of the top scientists that was then released by a Freedom of Information Act request. And you know what? Four days later, those same scientists wrote the first draft of a paper saying, “This came from nature.” That’s called a cover up. So this was the next step of this—you know, we got diverted.

Fidias Panayiotou: So, out of stupidity this happened?

Jeffrey Sachs: Oh my God, the world’s ruled by stupidity.

But by the way, in a very fascinating way, the science is genius, brilliant. The scientist who most likely made this is the world’s greatest scientist on beta coronaviruses; he’s a genius. You know what he can do? You know that a virus is a sequence of DNA or RNA material, so it’s like letters and so forth—30,000 of those base pairs. This guy is so smart that he figured out if you give him the list of 30,000 letters, he’ll turn the letters into a live virus. That’s genius. So in this sense, the world is ruled by genius—except not genius in what you do with this genius. Idiocy in what you do with it.

The same is true with nuclear weapons, by the way. To come up with the nuclear armaments required the greatest scientific genius of our time, the Los Alamos invention of the atomic bomb, led by twelve main but hundreds of the leading physicists in the world—brilliant, complete genius. But then it went to the US Army—a little different—to a general who said, “Well, why don’t we bomb the Soviets?” Because that’s a different matter; that’s not genius.

So we have a big problem in this world: the science is way ahead of us, way ahead of our governance. AI is genius, and it took basically from the 1950s till now—about seventy years—to bring about where we are right now in so many breakthroughs of science.

But who’s governing this stuff? Donald J. Trump! Good luck, that’s our problem.

[Jeffrey David Sachs is an American economist and public policy analyst who is a professor at Columbia University, where he was formerly director of The Earth Institute. Courtesy: The China Academy, an intellectual content network dedicated to helping global audiences understand the key dynamics that are driving how China sees the world, from expert voices in China.]