What if the pandemic safety net cobbled together in 2020 had been a new beginning?
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What if when Joe Biden came into office in 2021, the Covid-19 safety net he was handed had become a new floor?
What if that was his baseline—and the newly elected Democratic president, sold by his most ardent supporters as FDR 2.0, had used our Covid-19 response as the bare minimum of a new social contract with Americans?
What if the caring nature of the best aspects of the US Covid response became the map for international relations—leading not just to international cooperation on infectious disease, but on matters of war, climate and genocide?
What if, instead of dismantling the vaccine-delivery infrastructure—which, at its height, delivered some four million shots in a single day—the Biden administration built upon and made some version of it permanent, so that everyone could easily get annual Covid boosters, annual flu vaccines, or get specialty vaccinations during outbreaks of unusual viruses (such as for mpox during the 2022 summer outbreak among queer men) whenever they needed it?
What if the viral surveillance and communication mechanisms utilized for learning about SARS-CoV-2, treating it and telling the public about it were being used to address H5N1—a virus which has been moving from birds to farm mammals to humans with so little notice that dead cows were killed by the “avian flu” and left on the side of a road in California’s Central Valley, as “Thick swarms of black flies hummed and knocked against the windows of an idling car, while crows and vultures waited nearby—eyeballing the taut and bloated carcasses roasting in the October heat”?
What if the leaders of the Democratic party had used Covid as a blueprint to make a national platform based on care?
What if all the ways Covid had made clear how farmers, industrial butchers, kitchen staff and other food workers are the most at risk people amongst us to viral infection led to meaningful, permanent protections, such that they were much less likely to contract not just SARS-CoV-2 but H1N1, H5N1, influenza, or any other existing or novel pathogens?
What if all the all the ways Covid exposed how unsafe industrial food production is (for the workers who make it and the people who eat it alike) had triggered safety reforms, instead of having these warnings ignored and leading towards record numbers of safety recalls for e-coli, Salmonella, and Listeria?
What if an airborne pandemic had led to indoor air being as filtered, treated and regulated as drinking water?
What if everyone with a child was still getting a $300 check from the US treasury, so that having a child was not a gambling-style risk, but a responsibility shared with all of society?
What if the paused-for-years student debts were forgiven, so that young people could actually begin their lives?
What if Biden built on Americans’ experience of just showing up somewhere to get the medical care they needed to create a universal healthcare system?
(What if Kamala Harris built upon Americans’ taste of not getting charged at the point of such service—and campaigned on Medicare for All?)
What if once the link between Covid and homelessness was established, the Democrats had pushed infectious disease as just one reason for an end to evictions and a robust, public-health-backed campaign to end homelessness and stop the United States from having more people living on the streets than any other country?
What if after the link between Covid and incarceration was established, the Democrats had pursued decarceration as a public health measure and—instead of throwing weed and cryptocurrency at us—had made reducing incarceration a centerpiece of the Harris campaign to earn the votes of Black men?
(What if after 100,000 Californias died of Covid and the links between Covid, homlessness and incarceration were clear, residents of the Golden State chose to allow rent control and to abolish legal slavery in prisons—instead of voting to ban rent control and to continue prison slavery?)
What if the leaders of the Democratic party had used Covid as a blueprint to make a national platform based on care?
Would we be in the lethal position we are now—with a genocide raging abroad, Covid deaths in the hundreds every week at home, a poisoned food supply, $17 trillion in household debt, oligarch goons ready to dismantle government regulations, and a sociopath heading back into the White House—if Covid had been the floor?
